


The Price of War

by shuofthewind



Series: The Making of Monsters [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Actual Alley Cat Matthew Murdock, Alix Made Some Dumb Writing Choices Initially And Now They're Gone, Alternate Season/Series 01, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Darcy Never Met Jane, Angst and Feels, Avengers references, BAMF Women, Batfamily Parallels, Bechdel Test Pass, Blind Fluffball of Raging Justice, Blood and Torture, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Cliffhanger Conga Line, Don't Fuck With Claire Temple, Edited slightly, Elena Escapes The Fridge, End Racial Stereotyping, F/M, Female Friendship, Feminist Themes, Fix-It of Sorts, Foggy Is Done With This Shit (Except Not Really Because They'd All Fall Without Him), Foggy Nelson Accepts Bribes In The Form Of Good Bagels, Foggy Nelson Is Very Important, Friends to Lovers, In Which Darcy Does Not Bake, Japanese!Kate Bishop, Karen Page: Milk and Honey Warrior Queen, Lots of Cursing, Madame Gao Headcanons, Male-Female Friendship, Marci Stahl Headcanons, POV Third Person, Past Rape/Non-con, Pop Culture, Pre-Transfusion Jen, Present Tense, Protect Melvin Potter 2K15, Protective Kate Bishop, Rape Recovery, References to Race Issues, References to Rape Culture, References to Social Justice, Slow Build, Team as Family, The Anti-Fridge AU, The One Where All The Ladies Get Shit Done, Trans Female Character, Trans!Kate Bishop, Vanessa Headcanons, Vanessa Marianna Is No Angel, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-07-19
Packaged: 2018-03-29 16:40:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 24
Words: 284,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3903400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moving to Manhattan is supposed to be a stopgap until she gets her GED. Instead, she gets a sister (well, cousin, technically, but neither of them quibble), a degree, a firm, a devil, and a whole pack of monsters.  </p><p>God, she really should be getting therapy. </p><p>[Or, the one where Darcy Lewis stitches up gut wounds, runs away from home, buys a gun, becomes a lawyer, helps start a blog, saves a life, may or may not have squishy feelings, and learns how to make a mean chocolate babka. Not necessarily in that order.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Point Zero

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for: discussion of alcoholism, discussion of drug use, the striking of a child by a parent, implications of past attempted assault, mentions of battle and panic attacks, drinking.

_Peace without Justice is a low estate,_  
_A coward cringing to an iron Fate!_  
_But Peace through Justice is the great ideal;_  
_We’ll pay the price of war to make it real._  
—Henry Van Dyke, “The Price of Peace”

 _…‘ere half my days in this dark world and wide,_  
_And that one talent which is death to hide…_  
—John Milton, “On His Blindness”

Darcy’s fifteen when she gets banned from the local RadioShack for stealing an iPod.

Well, okay. First of all, she’s not _technically_ banned, she’s just never stupid enough to go back there again after everything. Secondarily, it’s more of a “I _happened_ to be in that one RadioShack when that gang of kids from my school decided to hold up the store for all its money and valuables, which I had _happened_ to overhear in the locker room, and I just _happened_ to snag an iPod off the floor when they dropped it” circumstance. It had already been stolen. She just reappropriated it when they were dumb enough to drop the damn thing. She was doing her civic duty as a law-abiding citizen and all-around music-lover.

Also Fred is better off with her than being sold on the black market for Apple products.

Her mom’s fed up with her. It’s not the RadioShack thing, exactly, or the getting-escorted-home-by-the-police thing, or even the iPod thing. No, her mom is sick of Darcy in general. She’s sick of Darcy’s attitude, she says. She’s sick of the fact that Darcy keeps locking Lou, Lorna’s stoner boyfriend, out of the house. She’s sick of Darcy painting her nails black and getting weird piercings and tattoos, and she’s _especially_ sick of how Darcy will lie in wait to dump Lorna’s booze down the toilet at four in the morning. She doesn’t say that last bit, but Darcy knows it’s true, because she throws shit when she can’t find her vodka the next day.

It’s the iPod that’s the clincher, though. (Plus the coming-home-with-cops bit, since Lou has bags of weed stashed all over the house and already has a record.) Lorna slams the door after the cops as they go. Darcy compliments her on the whole being concerned thing. “Not like I was nearly just shot, y’know, it’s your boyfriend that matters.” They get into a fight. It’s shitty. Darcy gets punched in the face by her mother. It’s not the first time she’s ever been punched in the face, but it’s the first time she’s been punched by her mother at all. It kind of sucks and is in no way enjoyable. Darcy waits until Lorna slams out of the house, and then packs up her shit, shoves her new iPod into her pocket, and leaves.

She has a second-cousin in New York City that reminds Darcy of a mousy Helena Bonham Carter. They’ve only met in person once, but since there’s less of an age gap between them than there is with any of Darcy’s other relatives (ten years instead of twenty-five) they’ve been friends on Facebook since Darcy opened an account. They also play World of Warcraft together, so she knows that Jen is more than willing to have Darcy sleep on her floor for a couple of days.

Jen is in her last year of law school, living in a run-down flat in Hell’s Kitchen, and she’s in the process of dyeing her hair a vivid and rather ugly shade of purple when Darcy shows up on her doorstep, looking like she’s had the shit kicked out of her and bearing a please-don’t-hate-me gift of the entirety of her savings. Jen just stares at her for a long moment before stepping out of the way, and letting Darcy in.

“Half and half,” she says, when they’ve finished putting Jen’s hair up in plastic wrap. Jen’s taken a good look at Darcy’s black eye and split lip, and can’t seem to decide whether to look angry or just terribly sad. Jen also stutters, and has rimless glasses that reflect light in a way that hurts Darcy’s eyes. “I-If you stay here, you p-pay half the rent. And get a job,” she adds, surprisingly stern. Darcy nods, and flinches when Jen touches a Q-tip to the cut in her eyebrow.

“I didn’t come here looking to move in.” Her shitty Southern accent always comes out more when she’s nervous. She sounds like a hick. Darcy draws a breath. “I—I just needed somewhere safe to get back on my feet, you know? I can move out as soon as I find another place.”

“Darcy,” says Jen. “You’re fifteen. It would be m-morally d-defunct of me to l-let you wander off. A-And I don’t mind,” Jen adds. “I-It’d be nice. I-I can finally get a cat, since we’ll b-both be here to take care of it.”

A cat does sound nice. Darcy swallows. “But I can’t just—”

“Y-You’re not just.” Jen peels open a Band-Aid. “I’m o-offering. F-for as long as you want.”

Darcy wants to cry. She stops herself, because she has a mighty will and will not cry in front of her cousin, no matter how nice she’s being.

“I’m n-not your legal guardian,” Jen adds, once she’s smoothed the Band-Aid over the eyebrow and started in on the bruises. “Y-You’ll have to t-talk to her eventually.”

“I’ll write her a letter,” says Darcy, and then curses under her breath when her lip splits open again.

“I-I can understand that y-you wouldn’t want to talk about it.” Jen shifts, awkwardly. “But—but if you were…y’know.”

She looks so horrified by the idea that Darcy’s been abused long-term that Darcy can only pat her head affectionately. She gets purple hair dye on her palm.

“Mom and me had a fight,” she says. “One time only dealio. She’s not gonna headhunt you or anything. She’s probably too drunk to even notice I’m gone.” She brightens. “Plus, I used my fake ID to get a bus ticket. So they won’t find me too fast.”

Jen wilts into her chair.

She’s stopped the bleeding in Darcy’s lip and started to put the first aid kit away when she clears her throat again. “T-That’s not what worries me.” Jen tosses a dirty cotton ball into the garbage can at their feet. “I-I just want you to feel safe. Th-that’s all.”

It’s sweet. Unexpectedly so. Darcy clears her throat. “You’ve never had me as a housemate before. Who knows if you’ll feel safe in three days’ time?”

Jen considers that for a moment. Then she nods once, her eyes surprisingly sharp. “I think I can manage.”

Darcy’s so startled by that show of spine that she forgets to mention that she doesn’t eat kosher. Still, it’s kind of awesome to get matzo ball soup delivered at three in the morning. She likes this New York thing.

.

.

.

She’s eighteen when she finally takes Jen’s advice and starts applying to college.

Darcy’s been working full time at Starbucks since she earned her GED. She makes just enough to cover her half of the rent and cab money, but not much else. Jen is at the district attorney’s office, and keeps muttering in Greek over the files she brings home from work. It’s cute, in a way that is both odd and unsettling. Greek swear-words sound like Satanic chants from hell when you hear them through Metallica.

Lorna has never come after her, and the paperwork Darcy posted to Atlanta—the stuff that helped Darcy become an emancipated minor, on Jen’s advisor’s suggestion—was returned promptly, even if it had all been sloppily signed. And also stained with vodka.

Darcy’s still not sure if that hurts or not.

“I don’t need to go to college, Jen.” Darcy crosses her legs around a pillow, settling a tub of ice cream on her knee. “I’m up for promotion to assistant manager soon. Sort of. I look older than I am because of the boobs, so they’re more likely to promote me than not. Besides, how can I afford to go to college? I have, like, no available cash. Ever.”

“Student loans,” says Jen. She’s been taking lessons in elocution, to work on her stutter. It hasn’t been going very well, but then again, Jen doesn’t seem to care all that much. For someone who has so much social anxiety, Jen Walters cares very little about what people think of her stammer. “A-And grants. I applied for lots of grants.”

“The shop is full of whiny part-timers bitching about student loans.” Darcy whacks the top of the ice cream with the spoon. “I _really_ don’t want to join the herd.”

Jen makes her dismissive noise, which is part exasperation, part kitten-falling-off-a-couch. It’s depressingly cute. “The point isn’t getting loans. The point is getting a higher-paying job through achieving education.”

Darcy makes a farting sound.

“You know I hate it when you do that.”

“Sorry, not sorry.”

“I found the Columbia brochure,” Jen says, and Darcy hears the final nail in the coffin. Jen’s ears are a bit pink. “I d-didn’t know you were looking into law.”

She shovels ice cream into her mouth, and then stares pointedly at the TV. Jen just gives her that squirmy happy puppy look, though. Darcy muffles her face in the pillow. “Vnktd.”

“Untranslatable.” Jen shoves her glasses up her nose and snaps out a T-shirt, folding it neatly in two. Darcy swears under her breath, and throws the pillow at Jon Stewart’s face.

“Doesn’t matter. It’s not like I’m actually gonna get in.”

“It _does_ matter.” Jen folds a pair of jeans. “You’re allowed t-to want things, Darcy.”

“Thank you, Dr. Phil.” Darcy squashes her face into another pillow. It’s safe in pillows. Then she lifts her head, and says, “I wanted to be a lawyer when I was a kid. My grandfather was one. That’s what Babushka said. She talked about him a lot, I dunno. He seemed like a badass.”

Jen looks pleased. “Well. Good.”

“Jen, there’s no way in hell I’m gonna get into law school, let alone _Columbia Law_.” Darcy wedges her spoon into the carton of ice cream again, trying to lever up a piece of brownie. “They only accept, like, uber-geniuses. I am average. Hot, but average.”

“Your SAT scores are good.” Jen taps her lower lip. “You should at least try. I c-can spot you the application fee so you can pay for your phone bill this month. It shouldn’t make things t-too hard for either of us.”

“Don’t you _dare_.” Darcy shakes the spoon at her. Darla the cat tries to lick it, and Darcy pets her nose. “I will put earwigs in your _bed_.”

Jen collects her laundry and shuffles away, humming Around the World by Buddy Greco under her breath. It’s never a good sign when Jen hums Greco. Darcy resolves to keep a close eye on her social security card, in case Jen tries to apply on Darcy’s behalf.

Three weeks later, after much harassment, Darcy applies all on her lonesome. Columbia is the only one she actually submits, and she kind of half-asses the whole thing until Jen gives her one of those looks over the top of her freaky-ass rimless glasses. Darcy is not a fan of those looks. She fixes the application, sends it in, and then forgets about it, because the likelihood of Columbia actually being interested in her is basically nil.

The acceptance letter comes with an offer of a twenty-five thousand dollar scholarship. Darcy eats a whole tub of ice cream by herself again, and then steals some Bailey’s from the corner store and drinks that by herself too, because what the hell. Jen doesn’t approve. Darcy doesn’t give a shit.

“Well,” says Jen, once Darcy’s good and smashed. “You’ve already stolen all my old Columbia hoodies. It’s probably a good thing they accepted you. You don’t have to buy new ones now.”

“Bite me,” says Darcy.

Darla the Vampire Cat bites her instead.

.

.

.

Her first class of the semester is Intro to Criminal Justice, and she’s really wondering if Jen’s ability to railroad her into doing shit is going to bite her in the ass sooner rather than later. She hasn’t been in a classroom for three years, not since she grabbed her GED and rode it like a bull, and all of these kids are dewy-eyed and earnest-looking. More than half of them look rich. More than half of them are male. Sometimes the two intersect, sometimes they don’t, but it’s enough to make her slightly uncomfortable and tug on the end of her ratty hoodie. (Her Culver hoodie, not her Columbia hoodie. She’s not going to be dorky enough to wear a Columbia hoodie on the _first day of school._ )

 _Loans_ , she thinks, taking a seat against the wall and turning Fred’s volume up to blistering. _Seven years of school._ That in and of itself sounds nauseous. Then: _sexist stoner frat boys._

She nearly books it out the door again at that one, because she _cannot_ deal with another Lou. She _will not_.

It’s two minutes to nine when someone taps her desk. Darcy looks up from her doodling—she’s been planning a new tattoo for a few months now, something that means _Jen_ ; she wants it to go on her shoulder blade—and blinks. The boy standing next to her is tall, and awkwardly skinny, wearing sunglasses and carrying a stick. She tugs one of her earbuds out. “Sorry, what?”

“Is this seat taken?” he asks, and sets his fingertips to the desk in front of her, up against the wall and closest to the door. It’s obviously empty, considering no one is snarling at him for it, but at the same time he wouldn’t be able to tell if someone had left a backpack and just ditched. Darcy yanks out her other earbud.

“No,” she says. “Go ahead.”

The boy with the sunglasses sets his hand to the back of the desk chair, and then settles himself. The glasses are thin and rectangular. He’s using a guiding cane, not a long one; she wonders if the long ones bother him the way they did her babushka. He hesitates, face turned towards her but not really, and then offers one hand. “Matt Murdock.”

Darcy shakes his hand twice. “Darcy Lewis.”

The corners of his mouth lift. “Darcy like _Pride and Prejudice_?”

“Darcy like Darcy’s law, actually.” She studies him. “But my grandmother was a huge literature nerd so it could have been Mr. Darcy, too.” 

The half-smirk turns into an actual smile, and Darcy thinks, _uh-oh_. Matt Murdock has a killer smile. It’s not fair. She clicks her piercing against the back of her teeth, and then says, “Am I gonna be the first person to make the ‘justice is blind’ joke or have, like, a million people said that already?”

Matt chokes, and ducks his head. For a second, she thinks she’s overstepped, and hates herself. Usually Darcy’s pretty good at reading people’s humor boundaries—retail, food service, and life as a Lewis have given her an edge—but sometimes she does still fuck up. She thinks she might have, here, until Matt’s shoulders start shaking, and she realizes that he’s trying to stop himself from laughing. “No,” he says. “No, you’re—you’re the first so far. Congratulations.”

Darcy lets out a breath she hopes he won’t hear. “Oh. Awesome. I like being a pioneer.”

He sends that smile at her again, and then the prof comes in and starts handing out syllabi, so they both have to shut up.

Thanks to super-awkward ice-breakers, Darcy learns three things about Matt Murdock by the time the class is over. One: he reads way more philosophy books than is normal for a human being. Two: he gets brain freezes easily, and thus does not eat ice cream except for very special occasions. And three: if he could go anywhere, he would want to go into space, because, and she quotes, “it’s the only place I’ll know for sure I won’t crash into anything, because other than the tether line, there’s nothing in space for me to crash into.”

They get into a dumb argument over space waste, but it’s funny more than anything. Darcy decides Intro to Criminal Justice may not be such an irritating class after all.

Then of course a guy in the front row raises his hand to ask whether or not they get extra credit for having experienced the criminal justice system from the inside, and Darcy has to hide her face in her hands to stop herself from crying.

.

.

.

Meeting Foggy doesn’t go nearly so smoothly, but that’s only partially her fault.

Darcy’s at work. She’s finagled double-shifts over the weekends with her boss, to make up for all the work she has to miss during the school week, so she’s been here since five in the morning and has already had three guys try to touch her face, which she hates. (She also has a girl give her name as Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons, and so had had a pow-wow over the _A Song of Ice and Fire_ series, but that’s a single bright spot in a sea of general fuckwaddery.) She has a forty-five minute break for each of her shifts today, and she’s expecting Matt to show up at about three o’clock so they can go over some stuff before the test on Monday.

She does not expect a dude with long hair and a round, happy face to bounce up to her counter at two-forty-five, order a coffee, and then say, “Do I know you?”

“Excuse me?” says Darcy, wondering if she ought to call Ben the security guard out of the back room. (Yes, they have a security guard at this Starbucks. They’re special because someone tries to hold them up at least once a month. Apparently, people think coffee shops make All Of The Cash.)

Round Happy Dude is peering at her. He has hair down to his shoulders and a camo jacket, and he looks like he’s semi-hung-over. He frowns. “I swear to god I know you from somewhere.”

“If you say it’s from your dreams, I will destroy you.” She sprays whipped cream into a frappuccino, and passes it on to Zeke. Zeke is giving Round Happy Dude one of his death glares. Zeke has been obnoxiously protective of Darcy ever since Darcy dumped salt into the coffee of Zeke’s ex-boyfriend, who used to smack Zeke around a lot because he’s tiny and trans. (By the time she leaves the Starbucks a few years later, she's also punched the bastard off the clock, which is awesome, but that’s neither here nor there.) Right now, Zeke’s obnoxious protective streak is more than okay by Darcy.

“No—I mean.” Round Happy Dude snaps his fingers a few times. Then, slowly, his eyes widen, and a look of absolute horror comes over his face. He turns around sharply and marches away, and Darcy wonders what the hell Zeke did behind her back to cause _that_ reaction. When she looks around, though, Zeke is preoccupied with the caramel and the chocolate dispensers.

“What the hell was that?” she asks, sliding the frappuccino onto the counter. “Venti strawberries and cream frappuccino with whip for Mirabella!”

“I don’t know,” says Zeke, tugging at his nose ring. “But he looked like he was about to shit himself, so whatever you did, kudos.”

Darcy spends another ten minutes peering at Round Happy Dude over in the corner before memory clicks. She’s been to a handful of parties since the start of the semester, but she’s only been royally trashed at one of them. Her roommate, Nicole, had heaved her out of the fray before she really managed to get herself into trouble, but she does remember a vague image of Round Happy Dude. Also that he’d tasted like really bad beer.

“I think I made out with him at a party once,” she says.

“Awkward,” says Zeke, and adds a vicious-looking smiley face to the froth on someone’s latte.

Thankfully, the rush dies down just before three o’clock, which is when she’s scheduled for a break. Darcy hangs her apron on a hook, undoes her ponytail, and slips into a booth at the back of the shop, dragging her textbook out of her battered backpack and setting to with the highlighter. She’s taken to only putting in one earbud lately, so she can listen for the tap of Matt’s stick. Darcy scrapes her fingernail over a healing burn on the inside of her wrist, where she has a tundra swan tattooed in shades of black. Usually, she wears a wristband to cover it at school, but she’s not allowed to wear bracelets or anything at work, so there you go.

She’s not the first one to greet Matt when he comes in through the door, though. Round Happy Dude pops up out of one of the window seats and scuttles over to him, clasping his elbow without thinking about it. Clearly, she thinks, they know each other.

Well, this isn’t awkward at _all._

“Hey,” says Darcy, when they get close enough to the counter for Matt to hear her. “I was wondering when you’d get here. I only have like a forty minute break.”

“Hey,” says Matt. Round Happy Dude looks like he’s about to shit himself again. “Darcy, this is Foggy. Foggy, Darcy.”

She looks at the windows for a moment, where the sun is stabbing people in the face with all the terrible light. Then Round Happy Dude ducks his head, and she realizes it’s his name. “Oh,” she says, and lets the smile that’s been pricking at her lips spread across her face. “We’ve met.”

“You have,” says Matt, slowly. Foggy’s eyes widen.

“Yeah, at a party.” Darcy waits until Matt’s sitting down and Foggy’s halfway there before she says, “He’s not that bad of a kisser, but his motorboating needs work.”

Foggy slips and nearly falls on his ass on the ground. It’s only once he catches himself and settles in the booth that he realizes Darcy’s grinning at him.

“You,” he says. “You suck. I was drunk. And I did _not motorboat you._ ”

“So was I, which is what makes it so much more hilarious.” She beams. “And dude, you so did. I don’t blame you. I was in my boob tank. I always get motorboated in my boob tank.”

Matt looks as though Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa have all come early. He nudges Foggy in the side. “You mean Darcy’s the one with the mouth? You’ve been calling my study partner ‘the one with the mouth?’ Foggy.”

“Oh, _god_ ,” says Foggy, and puts his head in his hands. “I am not having this conversation. This is not real life. I have died, and I will wake before the pearly gates having suffered through my worst nightmare so I don’t flip off Peter and go the other direction, because _this is what awaits me in hell._ ”

“Hell would be a lot worse,” says Darcy. “Hell would be me being that stripper you banged once while you were drunk, and also being Matt’s study buddy at the same time.” Foggy blanches, and buries his face in his arms this time. She pats his wrist, soothingly. “Did you really call me ‘the one with the mouth?’ I’m disappointed by the lack of creativity.”

“You’re the girl from Matt’s criminal justice class.” He sounds utterly miserable. “I wouldn’t have _called_ you that if I’d known you were the girl from Matt’s criminal justice class!”

“Foggy, be honest with me.” Darcy waits until he lifts his head. “Did you call me Blow Job Lips?”

Matt laughs until he wheezes, and by the end of it, Darcy has extracted a promise from Foggy Nelson to never call any girl Blow Job Lips again. Even if she has blow job lips.

It’s not a bad afternoon, all told. She gets a lot of blackmail out of it. Also, when he’s not drunk and attempting to shove his face in her boobs, Foggy is actually kind of awesome. By the time she has to kick them out (because they stay until ass o’clock alternating between studying and making fun of the way she makes coffee) she’s been enlisted to help Foggy prank Matt at a date in the near-to-distant future. After her shift's over (because they're creepy and wait for her) the three of them make their way back to Jen’s apartment, where Darcy has a load of laundry going, to start up a marathon of _Buffy the Vampire Slayer._

It’s weird, having friends over. She never did, in Atlanta. She’d skipped school too often and dyed her hair too many weird colors to actually get the hang of making friends. Still, she thinks, when she throws popcorn at the back of Foggy’s head, and Matt folds himself into the corner of the couch to listen to Buffy kick ass on the screen. It’s a nice kind of weird.

She dyes the stripes in her hair red for the occasion, and starts crashing on Matt and Foggy’s floor when she doesn’t want to catch a taxi back to her end of campus.

.

.

.

Darcy doesn’t really date. Well, no—she dates a lot, but she doesn’t actually have relationships with people very much. She and Matt kind of match that way. Usually she has one night stands that have her doing the walk of shame back up to her sixth-floor apartment carrying stilettos in one hand and rocking some serious sex hair. She only really dates a guy once, during her first year at actual real-person Columbia Law, rather than her bout of criminal justice and political science double-major idiocy.

His name is Eduardo. He’s two years older than her, a grad student majoring in history at NYU, and she meets him through Perdita, the tattoo artist who helped her design the symbol on the back of Darcy’s neck, the one that means _Matt and Foggy._ He’s a nice guy, for the most part. Sometimes he’s an asshole, but then again, sometimes so is she, so it’s not too bad. She likes him, and he can do seriously amazing things with his tongue. They’ve been together for about four months—which, for Darcy, is a record—when he asks her how many times she had to fuck the blind kid to get his help on tests.

She throws him out of the apartment she’s gone back to sharing with Jen, and then tosses all his clothes out the window, so he has to take the stairs buck-ass naked. Then, once she’s done cursing him out in Spanish, Russian, and what little Greek she’s learned from Jen, she goes down to the corner bodega and buys enough booze to get herself royally wasted. She’s fairly certain that Jen rats her out, because an hour into her pity party Foggy and Matt show up at her door bearing ice cream, more beer, and the newest season of _Doctor Who_. They cram together on the couch, squashing close as puppies, and if Darcy cries a little neither of them say anything. She falls asleep with Matt on one side and Foggy on the other, tipped sideways to rest her head on Matt’s shoulder. Her hand is tangled with Foggy’s, and Matt is stroking her hair.

She starts calling them “her boys” instead of “the boys” after that. Neither of them comment.

.

.

.

One night in their last year in undergrad, she borrows Foggy’s bed while he’s out on a date. It’s not uncommon, considering how often Darcy lurks in their building. She actually sleeps in their dorm room more often than her own at this point, because her junior year roommate, Lindsay, is a royal bitch and keeps sexiling her. Still, she doesn’t usually get a bed; she uses the sleeping bag she bought ages ago and kips on their floor. She’s only been asleep for about an hour when she hears the door open, and opens her eyes. Darcy’s always been a very light sleeper, no thanks to her mom’s many boyfriends. She rolls over onto her back, and then leans on her elbow, heaving herself semi-upright. In the door frame, Matt freezes. “Darcy,” he says. “Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

He sounds like shit. Darcy frowns at him. “It’s fine,” she says, her voice rasping. “Bad dreams. What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine,” says Matt, and kicks the door shut behind him.

“You sound like—” She doesn’t know what he sounds like. Like someone’s broken open his voice box, and flipped it backwards and upside-down. “You sound terrible.”

He hesitates. In the dark, she can just barely see his head tip to the side, the way it does when he’s thinking very carefully about what he’s going to say. “It’s nothing,” he says this time, which tells her it’s definitely something. “Don’t worry about it.”

Darcy turns on the light. He looks fine, for the most part. His knuckles are swollen, like he’s been hitting something. It’s the look on his face that bothers her. He’s very pale, and when he takes off his sunglasses, his eyes are red. Darcy slips out of Foggy’s bed and pads across the floor. “Hey,” she says, touching the back of his wrist. He jerks, as if she’s struck him. “Hey. What happened?”

He’s shaking, she realizes. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “Darcy, seriously,” he says. “I’m okay. Stop asking. _Please._ Just go back to sleep.”

His voice cracks. Darcy swallows. Then she touches his elbow. “I’ll be right back,” she says, and grabs one of Foggy’s sweatshirts, pulling it on over her head. “Get into bed, okay? I’ll be right back.”

Matt opens his mouth, and then closes it again. He nods. Darcy grabs her wallet, and kisses his cheek before slipping out of the dorm room.

She returns with three water bottles, two bags of Cheetos, two Rice Krispy treats, and a wet paper towel. Matt’s changed clothes; he’s sitting on the end of his bed, his hands dangling between his knees as if he’s not entirely sure what to do with them. She uses the paper towel to clean the smears from his face— _blood_ ¸ she realizes, her guts clenching, _it’s blood_ —and then pushes the Cheetos into his hands. “Cheetos,” she says. “Eat.”

“If I eat anything I’ll probably be sick.”

Darcy shrugs, and puts the Rice Krispy treats on the desk next to his sunglasses. . “We have a trash can. Eat the Cheetos, Matt. Don’t make me sing Fleetwood Mac." 

He doesn’t smile, but the tension in his face fades a bit. Matt eats the Cheetos. He doesn’t throw up, though he looks as though he wants to. Darcy watches him until he’s finished one of the three water bottles, and then she turns the light out again, and nudges him into lying down. Darcy sits down at the head of the bed, and searches his face. His eyes are wide open, and his hands are clenching against the blanket. She runs her fingers through his hair, which is something she doesn’t usually let herself do. He flinches at the touch.

“Foggy’s gone for the night,” she says, before he can ask. His hands relax infinitesimally against the covers. “He’s dating that girl from his advanced civic law class. Marci, or whatever. I think he’s staying over with her tonight.”

Matt closes his eyes. She hesitates, and then strokes his hair again. This time he doesn’t flinch.

“I won’t ask,” she says, almost in a whisper. It feels like she’s telling him a secret, somehow. “But I’ll stay with you, if you need me to.”

Matt’s silent for a long time. She thinks he might have fallen asleep. Then he slips two fingers into the pocket of Foggy’s hoodie, the heel of his palm resting against her thigh. He doesn’t say anything. Still, Darcy takes off her glasses, nudges the covers aside with her foot, and scoots down until she’s lying flat next to him in the cramped bed. She just looks at him for a time, not wanting to freak him out, too nervous to touch him. Then she reaches out with one hand, and weaves her fingers into the soft fabric of his T-shirt. Matt lets out a long breath, as if she’s given him permission, and slings an arm over her waist. There’s this awkward shuffling moment which ends with her head tucked under his chin, her nose pressed into his collarbone. She’s been this close to him before—Darcy’s huggy, and she’s fallen asleep next to Matt more times than she can count—but never quite like this. Not with his heartbeat under her palm, or her toes curling into the hem of his pajama pants. He smells like dust and grease and something else, very un-Matt, and it’s worrying.

She’s not sure when she falls asleep, only that she must have, because when she wakes up Matt’s nose is tucked into her hair. He’s breathing deeply, his eyes closed, eyelashes dusting his cheek. She’s always hated it in books when the author talks about a sleeping person as ‘vulnerable,’ but Matt _is_. She’s never noticed, before this moment, that Matt hides so much behind his glasses. Without them, there’s a sort of tiredness in his face that she doesn’t recognize, and it scares her, 

Darcy watches him for a few minutes. Then she extracts herself, slowly, so she doesn’t wake him, and leaves the room. It takes forty minutes in the shower to wash the scent of him from her skin.

Neither of them mention it. It doesn’t happen again.

.

.

.

Their graduation from undergrad is interrupted by the Battle of New York.

Darcy, Foggy, and Matt hide in a subway station until it’s over, ushered there by the emergency services people who had been hanging around the ceremony smoking before a giant fucking hole opened up in the sky and started shitting aliens. Darcy has a panic attack, and nearly faints when she can’t reach Jen. There’s nothing they can do but wait, and when they emerge, the whole of Midtown is forever changed.

The next morning, Darcy wanders down to the civilian-approved wreckage, and starts helping people clean it all up.

.

.

.

“No, Foggy.”

“Come _on_ , Darce.” He only calls her Darce when he really wants her to do something. Darcy wipes out a mug with a wet towel, then sets it upside down so it can dry. “Landman and Zack is basically the best possible place to clerk. Matt’s already gonna fill out an application.”

Matt, who has earbuds in and is running his fingers over one of his braille readers, says, “Mm.”

“It’s super competitive.” Darcy adds caramel to Foggy’s coffee and slides it across the counter to him. “That doesn’t mean that it’s the _best_ place to clerk. I’ve heard weird things about Landman and Zack, Foggy. Jen doesn’t like them much.”

“Jen works in the DA’s office,” says Foggy, as if this is an explanation. “C’mon, it’ll be awesome. We can all do it together. I took the tour yesterday, for prospies, and they have free bagels, Darcy. Every morning, a million different kinds of free bagels. A whole semester of it. Maybe a whole year of them.  _Think of it._ ”

She gives Matt his coffee too (black, no cream, one sugar) and taps the back of his hand to let him know that it’s on the counter. It still gives her stomach the weird clenchy cramps to have him smile at her, but at least she can manage that. Darcy goes back to spraying out the blender jugs they use for the frappuccinos. “You’re such a bagel whore.”

“I appreciate flawless baked goods.” Foggy shrugs. “Sue me. But don’t, actually. Seriously, though, Darcy, it’d be really good. Awesome résumé credits and everything. And if we’re really lucky they might want to hire one of us once we take the bar.”

It's a year away. The words _the bar_ still make her break out in a cold sweat. “I don’t want to be a lawyer that only works for the rich and famous, Foggy. It seems kinda like taking it from the man.” Someone opens the door to her Starbucks, pauses, looks at them, and then vanishes back out into the rain. She’s pretty sure he’s someone from her thesis class, because he has that look on his face that most people get when they take classes with Darcy: scared shitless and somewhat in awe. “Besides, I found a position with Day By Day, and I—um. I might have an interview with them next week.”

Matt must hear that bit, because he tugs one of his earbuds out, and says, “The domestic violence awareness people?”

“Spousal and intimate partner abuse,” she corrects. Matt makes an _ah_ face. “For people under the age of twenty-four. Zeke told me about them, he went to see them after what happened with Shitty Michael. _Yes_ , I swear at work, and my boss doesn't chastise me for it, deal with it, lady.” The business woman in the Versace suit sniffs loudly and marches out of the Starbucks. Darcy breaks a lot of HR and customer service rules, but Reyna loves her, so she’s basically never getting fired. “They do case management and legal advocacy, and they have a few clerk positions available for legal students. So I thought I’d apply there.”

Foggy’s silent for a moment. Then he says, “Well, now you’ve made me feel shitty for wanting money.”

She pats his wrist. “Honey, I make you feel shitty just by existing, because my boobs are so much bigger than yours.”

“This is true. I have much boob envy.”

Matt pulls his other earbud out, and turns off the machine. “What’s Jen say?” 

“Jen wants me to go to the DA’s office, but I dunno. I don’t really want to be a state defense attorney. Or a public defender, which was her second suggestion. ‘cause, you know. Indigent gangsters.”

“Preach,” says Foggy, and sips at his coffee. “Yet another reason why Landman and Zack is a good idea. We can afford to be picky, if we get into their good graces. We can take jobs with _figures_. Big figures, on paychecks. With lots of zeros.”

Darcy huffs, and shoves her glasses up her nose. “If I go to Landman and Zack I’ll have to stop dyeing my hair and take out my tongue piercing. You know how fast holes in your tongue grow over? I had to take out my piercing once for an interview, and four hours later, I couldn’t put it back in. They grow over _fast,_ Foggy. I’d have to get my tongue pierced all over again, and that shit _hurts_.”

Foggy doesn’t have a response for this.

“I think it’s a good idea,” says Matt. Darcy blinks at him, and then turns away so she can hide her smile from Foggy. “If she doesn’t want to apply to Landman and Zack, then she doesn’t have to, Foggy. Besides, we need more legal advocates.”

“Very true, but the point remains that Darcy is ditching the trio.” Foggy gives Matt a black look, and then says, “I’m glaring at you, Matt.”

“I thought you might be,” says Matt.

“I’m not _ditching the trio_ , you dork.” Darcy shakes the excess water out of the blender bits, and then sets them aside too. “I’m just taking a temporary leave of absence while you two sell your souls to the proverbial devil. We’ll still be best broskis.”

“Landman and Zack isn’t the _devil_.”

“Mephistopheles, maybe,” says Matt, “but not the devil.”

“You are both dead to me.”

“Fine.” Darcy snaps her fingers. “Gimme back your free coffee.”

“Temporarily dead,” says Foggy, and tugs his coffee cup away from her. “For like, three seconds. Like Iron Man.”

“That’s better.” She sighs. “I’ll apply, Foggy, all right? But I reserve the right to refuse. And I’m still going to my interview with Day By Day next week.”

“I never said you shouldn’t.” Foggy says, and reaches across to squeeze her shoulder. She nudges his wrist with her nose, and he lets go. “And if you want to ditch us to be a legal advocate, then you should totally ditch us, because you would be an awesome legal advocate. Just write us letters from time to time.” He pauses. “I’ll read Matt’s aloud to him word for word, don’t worry.”

Matt kicks him in the ankle.

“To indigent gangsters,” says Darcy, lifting the macchiato she’s making for some woman out on the floor. Foggy raises his own cup.

“To Landman and Zack,” he says.

“To the bar," says Matt, and Darcy throws a crumpled napkin in his face.

.

.

.

“Fuck Landman and Zack,” says Foggy.

They’re sitting at their slice of the counter at Josie’s. The bar top is stickier than usual, but Darcy’s pretty sure that’s because Josie lets her cockatoo knock over beer jugs for fun, rather than any more unsettling and/or disgusting reason. On top of the television, Rosa the cockatoo bobs her head as if she can hear Darcy’s thoughts, and says, “ _Fuck the police!_ ” in a voice that sounds rather like Crazy Tom, who lives in the alleyway.

“You don’t want to fuck Landman and Zack,” says Darcy. “They’ll be uncomfortable. Besides, you were there for the possibility of giant wads of cash, not a good lay.”

“Fuck money,” Foggy says, sounding slightly slurred. He’s had two drinks for every one that Matt and Darcy have been nursing. She’ll start being worried if he starts singing about butcher shops.

“Money wouldn’t be comfortable, either.”

“C’mon, Foggy,” says Matt on Foggy’s other side. “It was the right thing to do, you know that.”

“Fuck the right thing,” says Foggy. “The _money_ , Matt. We could have had _convertibles._ ”

“Built on the backs of honest, middle-class Americans being stripped of their rights by the legal machinations of the one percent,” says Darcy. Oppie, her supervisor at Day By Day, may or may not have instilled a healthy dose of social justice warrior into her very marrow. Foggy rests his head on the bar top.

“The _money_.”

“He’ll be like this for an hour or so,” says Matt, as if she doesn’t already know that. Then she realizes he's talking to Josie, who, no shit, actually looks concerned. “Then he’ll get over it.”

“Cars,” says Foggy. “Expensive wine. Attractive women with flexible virtue. Don’t you say a word,” he adds to Darcy, who’s opened her mouth to talk about the patriarchal asshattery of the virgin/whore dichotomy. She presses her lips tight together for a moment.

“Would you want to date someone who was only in it for the money?” says Matt. “I thought Marci ditched you because you wouldn’t agree to being her partner-in-crime.”

“I _broke up_ with Marci because she is a soulless automaton who kept trying to put me in pinstripes.” Foggy sets his shot glass very carefully on the table, and Josie plonks the tequila bottle down in front of him. Darcy snags it before he can fill his glass to overflowing. “It was awful. Also, I think she was trying to eat my dick. Like…actually physically consume it and imbue its dickly powers.”

“Contrary to popular belief, penises do not actually have superpowers.” She gives Foggy half a shot instead of a full one. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Sorry to break your heart. She might have been trying to eat it to make you feel emasculated and thus permanently tie you to her side, though.” Maybe she’s a little more buzzed than she thought she was. “Ooh, she could have put a collar on you. Can I put a collar on you and take pictures to send her?”

Foggy doesn’t seem to hear. “Marci,” he says again, “is a soulless automaton.”

“We heard that bit, sweetheart.”

“I would look terrible in pinstripes. Matt, say I would look terrible in pinstripes.”

“He would look terrible in pinstripes,” Matt says in a flat voice. Foggy swings around to look at Darcy this time.

“See, Matt agrees.”

“Foggy-bear, you’re well on your way to being wasted, and my phone died like half an hour ago so I can’t film it. _No bueno_.” She knocks a shot back herself—the tequila burns marvelously going down, almost like battery acid—and then confiscates Foggy’s shot glass.

“Noooo.” Foggy makes grabby hands at his glass. “Give. You’re mean.”

“Drink some water and then we’ll talk.”

“You and your job offers,” says Foggy. “Your dumb, dumb job offer that you’re probably gonna take. You’re gonna take it, aren’t you? You’re going to have a _job_ and me and Matty are gonna live in the _gutter_.”

Matt swirls his beer in the bottle. “Subway tunnels would be easier.”

“You,” Darcy tells Foggy, “are ridiculous. And you,” she adds to Matt, flinging a bit of popcorn at his head, “need to stop encouraging him. I’m working on getting my own place, and as soon as I do you guys can stay with me if you end up homeless.”

“With all of the money,” says Foggy, “from your _job_. That you won't reject, because you’re _smarter_ than me and Matt.”

She pats his cheek. “Go to sleep, dear.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. It’s patronizing.”

“Are you going to take it?” Matt tilts his head at her from Foggy’s other side, his glasses reflecting the light from the TV. “The job with Day By Day.”

Darcy sighs, and props her elbows up on the counter. She’ll think about the process of actually _removing_ them from the counter later, when there’s not alcohol to be consumed. “Oppie wants me to,” she says. “Jen thinks it’d be a good place to start, too. I already know how everything works, and what I’d have to do. I just—” She shoves her glasses up her nose. They’re slipping again. “I dunno. We have to pass the bar first. I don't want to make any plans until I know I'm good.”

On top of the TV, Rosa shouts, “ _Si la belleza fuera delito, yo te hubiera dado cadea perpetua_!” and as one, they all duck. The only one who's too drunk or too slow to catch on is Crazy Tom, his bald scalp shining in the light of the TV. Rosa dive-bombs him with a wild shriek, scraping her claws over the top of his head. Crazy Tom shrieks, falling out of his chair, and starts swearing very loudly in Czech. Josie (who's been wiping out glasses with a dirty rag, safe in her spot behind the bar) whistles, and Rosa lands hard on her shoulder, flaring her crest in a dazzling array of yellow. It hurts Darcy’s eyes a little. Foggy steals his shot glass back, and starts eyeing the tequila bottle.

“Doesn’t that say something?” Matt tilts his head to the other side. “If you’re not sure.”

“Probably.” She pours Foggy half a shot. “I’m trying not to think about it. I have nine weeks to decide.” In fact, Oppie hadn't even been allowed to mention the possible job offer to her until they'd heard whether or not Darcy had passed the bar. Then again, Oppie has a "fuck the kyriarchy" mentality that Darcy can definitely get behind. Also, she finishes off at Day By Day on Friday, so she can spend the rest of the nine weeks pre-bar attempting to cram as much information into her head as possible without her brain exploding. So Oppie  _may_ have some ground to stand on, bureaucratically. 

“You know what?” says Foggy. “Fuck them. Fuck all of them. We’re awesome. We don’t need their shitty money. We,” he says again, and grabs Darcy’s hand and Matt’s, nearly knocking Matt’s beer over in the process, and shakes them emphatically, “are fucking _awesome_.”

“Well, that was quick.” Darcy squeezes his hand, and then disentangles herself. “Glad you feel better, sunshine.”

“We are so awesome,” Foggy continues, loud enough that on the other end of the bar, Josie lifts her head to eavesdrop, “that we should fuck _all_ the haters. Seriously, just screw ‘em. We’re _badasses._ ”

“Shut up!” squawks Rosa. Foggy ignores her.

“We are in fact too badass for any of them to handle.” He grabs a napkin, steals the pen from behind Darcy’s ear, and starts to doodle. “We are too badass for this whole goddamn _legal system_.”

“I think Jen would be mad if you said that.”

“Jen loves me.” Actually, Darcy’s pretty sure that Foggy is Jen’s favorite, so she’d probably forgive that from him. She scoffs.

“Suck-up.”

“That’s what she said.” Darcy rolls her eyes. Foggy scratches something deep into the napkin with her pen, enough that he nearly tears the paper. Matt rocks his beer bottle back and forth on the counter, thoughtfully.

“What are you thinking, Foggy?”

“I think he’s had too much tequila to really be thinking at all,” says Josie from behind the counter. Rosa says, “Traffic violations," and then flies away again.

“No, no no no, no, look.” He caps off the pen and settles the napkin between the three of them, mightily pleased with himself. Darcy leans forward. _Nelson, Murdock & Lewis,_ the napkin reads, in a simple rectangular border. _Attorneys at Law_.

For some stupid reason, her throat closes up. She has to swallow twice before she says to Matt, “He drew a sign for a legal firm.”

“ _Our_ legal firm,” says Foggy. “Because fuck the haters, we are awesome.”

“I told you Nelson sounded better at the front,” says Matt. Darcy blinks. Then she blinks again.

“You guys have been talking about this?”

“We have enough saved between the pair of us to get an office, even after we pay for the tutoring,” says Matt, as if he’s speaking sense and not _utter insanity_. “This is what we wanted at the beginning, wasn’t it? Helping the people who can’t help themselves. Fixing Hell’s Kitchen a little bit at a time.”

“Well, yeah, but—” She gapes like a fish. “Oh my god. And you included me?”

“Should we not have?” Foggy looks teary. He’s a weepy drunk. “We can take you out if you want. But it’s kinda funny, because it’s like the alphabet except backwards. _NML._ Like when people pull you over for drunk driving, and you have to—”

“Foggy,” says Darcy. “I love you, but shut up.”

Foggy shuts up. Matt doesn’t say anything either. Darcy chews at her lip, and then at her fingernails, staring at the little sketched-out sign on the counter. She knows, and has known for a while, that she has the least amount of liquid credit to her name out of the three of them—Matt inherited a lot of money when his dad died, and Foggy’s granddad left him enough to keep him steady for at least six months if he needs it. It’s Darcy who has big loans and second jobs to worry about, and she’s not sure jumping ship at Day By Day to start a fledgling legal firm will keep her on the up-and-up. Or out of the red. At all. And they still have the bar exam to worry about—her stomach is churning just thinking about  _that_. 

But.

She sticks on that but. But it could be amazing. But she would love it. But she _wants_ it. She’s never mentioned it to them before, but in their first year of law school she’d imagined, fleetingly, what it would be like to be a part of a real firm. Where she could pick and choose her own cases, where she could work with people she cared about and not have to worry about shitty bosses telling her what to do. She loves working at Day By Day, and she’s sure she’d enjoy having a real job there, and that she would be good at it.

“We could kill each other,” she says. “It might not end all that well.”

“Kill me, you cannot,” says Foggy in his Yoda voice. “And Matt would make that face that looks like a lost puppy and you’d lose all fury.”

Something’s bubbling inside her, like good champagne. Darcy bites back a grin. “He does have a good puppy face.”

“We’ll need it to bring in clients. We can use him like that milkshake song. Bring in the ladies.” He nudges at Matt’s elbow. “So. Lewis. You in?”

Darcy swallows. She looks at them, these men she’s known for seven years, who have never once turned their backs on her, who plastered awkward sex-joke bumper stickers all over Eduardo’s car for her, who she’d go up to bat for in an instant. Really, she thinks, it’s been a given that they’d do this since the beginning. _Nelson, Murdock, & Lewis, Attorneys at Law._

“Yeah,” she says. “Why the hell not.”

They drink to it, looping their arms together and trying not to hit each other in the face with their elbows. She vaguely remembers stumbling to Matt’s apartment after midnight, and falls asleep drooling on his knee.

She never said they’d be _classy_. After all, they’re all just avocados at heart. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I blame Yulya for this. I really, really do. Everyone should lecture Yulya, because she didn't stop me when I started, and now I will be dead from too many WiPs. 
> 
> Well, it's her fault, but it's also Charlie Cox's, because _damn, son_. 
> 
> Also: I will never let go of the avocado jokes. Sorry not sorry.
> 
> Day By Day is based on the organization Day One, which you can find at dayoneny.org. 
> 
> I have placed Daredevil, timeline-wise, in 2015 (obviously). Darcy, Matt, and Foggy each started working at their respective test organizations the summer before senior year of law school (so, in summer 2014) and stayed there until the end of spring semester in 2015, so almost a full year. Then they took the bar exam, because they're insane and like to drive themselves crazy. Law school typically lasts three years, so their undergrad ceremony would have been in May 2012, right when Loki attacks. What a time to be alive in New York City, yeah? (Edited to be more accurate thanks to the lovely inspired2013! You're a blessing.)
> 
> If anyone is interested, Darcy and Jen are maternal cousins; Jen is Darcy's mother's step-sister's child, not technically related by blood, but still legally related. Jen is Bruce's father's sister's daughter. So, Bruce and Jen are related, and Darcy and Jen are related, but Bruce and Darcy aren't related except in like...the third-cousins-once-removed kind of way.


	2. À Votre Santé

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unbeta'ed, and it's nearly 1am, so I'll fix it tomorrow. /salutes
> 
> Trigger warnings for: catcalling, the attack on Karen in episode one (blood, attempted strangulation, attempted murder), discussion of police brutality, and some blood (accidental injury; Darcy's a klutz). 
> 
> (also I love Karen so much you guys)

_Five months, two weeks, and thirteen days later…_

“Yep,” Darcy says, staring out the window of the new offices for Nelson, Murdock & Lewis. There’s a dumpster overflowing with furniture down below, and some random white boy, artfully shabby the way New York rich kids always are, rooting through the pillows and singing Springtime For Hitler at the top of his lungs. When he sees her looking, he makes a crude gesture, and thrusts his hips in the general direction of the building in time with _Don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party_! She flips him the finger, and then pulls the blinds again. “Awesome view we have here. You can see the Statue of Liberty and everything.”

“You’re a shitty liar,” says Matt. He’s standing close to the door, his hands wrapped around the handle of his cane. The blinds are stained yellow with old cigarette smoke. Darcy wipes her fingers on her leggings—the pull-rope is sticky, for some reason—and then shrugs.

“Whatever. I think someone’s sprayed essence of nicotine on everything. Can we open the windows?”

“Pretty sure the windows don’t actually open,” says Foggy from the other room. Darcy wrinkles her nose.

“Great. I’ll send the real estate agent a fuck you card.” She tests the windows anyway, because she’s never been one to say never. They’ve been painted closed. “What does the lease say? Can we make changes? Painting and restoration and stuff?” Something inside her cries at the thought of how much work this place needs. Then she looks back at the desk in the center of the room, and it settles again. Not _this_ place, she tells herself. _Their_ place.

“I don’t know,” says Matt. Darcy jumps back to reality. “But it’s long term, so I would think so.” He sets his fingers against the walls, and then wrinkles his nose. “Probably would improve the smell.”

“That is the smell of independence and impending debt,” Foggy shouts at them. "Don’t knock the smell, Murdock.”

“That explains why I feel so depressed.”

“The stains on the ceiling do give it a certain sort of charm.” Darcy touches his elbow to let him know that she’s passing, and then scoots into the entryway. “Can we haggle them into letting us paint everything? Because the walls are gross. And no matter what, I’m cutting through their shitty paint job on the windows, because we need fresh air in here. Not knocking,” she adds, when Foggy glares. “Just commenting. Pointedly.”

“That hurts, Darcy. In my soul.” Foggy returns to slinking around the room like an angry alley cat. “Besides, if you’re gonna mock anyone, mock Matt. He’s the one that wanted to take it.”

“Bite your tongue, Nelson. I like it too.” Darcy rolls her eyes. “It’s shitty on the outside but we’ll clean it up. Super metaphorical if you think about it. Besides, it’s basically the only thing we can afford, especially if you keep buying Brett’s mom expensive cigars.”

“She is an old lady who likes her pleasures, and it is not in me to deny her.”

Darcy, who has slipped more than a few times on her road to being cigarette free (thanks, bar exam), just huffs and rummages around in her purse for her flick knife. “Matt, you’re quiet today.”

“Hm?” Matt lifts his chin from the top of his guide cane. “What?”

“Case in point.” She snaps the knife open, and sets to on the paint holding the windows together. “What do you think about the walls? Paint? No? I have to tell you, it looks like they haven’t been touched since like…a decade before we were even born. The wallpaper has water stains roughly the size of small elephants.”

Foggy opens his mouth, and then closes it again, because there’s no way he can deny this.

“I can smell mold,” says Matt after a moment. When Darcy sniffs, she catches a hint of dampness under the dust, and realizes he’s right. “We should probably just tear the paper off and repaint it, yeah.”

“Yeah, see, paint means money,” says Foggy. “I feel obliged to mention that getting this place will wipe out whatever meager savings we had in the first place. So, no paint.”

“Foggy, these walls need to be put out of their misery.” She looks out the window again. “And I don’t mean by Hipster AdolF down there. Seriously, they’re sad, sad walls. This whole place feels sad.”

“I think the water stains provide character. And, bright side, it comes with free desks.” Foggy rubs his chin. “Matt, what do you think?”

“I think the mold is going to make me sneeze,” says Matt.

There’s a satisfying pop from the window. Darcy folds her knife up again, digs her nails in— _bye-bye, manicure_ —and heaves. After a moment, Foggy comes to help her, and with a terrible screeching sound the window finally shifts. Probably ten years of dust fly out of the cracks in the lining. Still, the relatively fresher smell of Hipster Adolf and his furniture rustling can’t do much worse to the stink of pre-incident New York and mold inside this room. “I think I have a few cans of paint leftover from when me and Jen redid the apartment,” Darcy says after a moment. “Six maybe? That should be enough for this place.”

Foggy steals her knife and starts on the second window. “In that case, you are more than welcome to take the walls out back and shoot them, because I’m pretty sure that stain will become sentient if we leave it alone.”

“Awesome. We can do it this weekend.”

Matt sneezes.

“Gesundheit,” says Foggy. “Still, we’re going to need more than metaphorical clients if you really want to fix the leaks.”

“Nah, the witch agent said that the leaks were fixed. The stains aren’t fresh, see? Just gross.” She kicks at the wall. It feels a bit stronger than plywood, which is good. She trips a lot, and doesn’t want to put an elbow through her future paint job. “Which is a blessing in disguise, because I’m pretty sure that this place also violates like fifteen fire codes or whatever. More, once we start getting people in here on a hypothetically semi-frequent basis.”

“Stop saying the ‘h’ word, you’ll jinx us.” Foggy wrenches at the second window, and it opens with a shriek like a dying pelican. “Getting clients would be easier if we weren’t trying to rely on the hordes of innocents accused of misdeeds clearly pounding on our door.”

“We should be saving the innocent, Foggy.” Matt taps on the floor with his cane for a moment, until he finds the desk. He wipes dust off of it with one hand. “That’s the whole point of this. It’s why we started in the first place.”

“ _Innocent until proven guilty_ and _pure as driven snow_ aren’t exactly mutually exclusive, Matt.” Foggy sends her a look. Darcy holds up her hands.

“Uh-uh. You know how I feel about this. I did victims’ counseling. Though, just to put it out there, if I ever have to defend someone accused of rape I might actually vomit on them.”

“Defending the innocent,” says Matt pointedly. Foggy rolls his eyes.

“The innocent rarely have the ability to pay our electric bills, Matt. I’m just saying that until we get on our feet it might be a little easier to take cases that aren’t so clear cut. That’s _all_.”

Darcy tunes them out. It’s not the first time they’ve squabbled about this, and she’s pretty sure that the argument won’t end unless one of them dies or quits law. Thankfully it’s never come down to anything more than squabbling, otherwise she might have to blast an air horn in their faces. She fixes her lipstick, checks her eyeshadow in a pocket mirror, and then ties her hair back into a ponytail. “Come on, boys,” she says. “The ethics debate can wait until after we’ve put those desks somewhere.”

The previous tenants of their new second-floor offices were bookies. At least, she thinks they were bookies, judging by the fact that she finds a bunch of old betting slips in the bottom drawer of one of the desks. They beg a few brooms, cloths, and polishing rags from the people who manage the restaurant downstairs, and set to on the floor and the three desks that have been abandoned in the wake of whatever bookie-shenanigans drove their predecessors out in such a hurry. Darcy tugs down all the wallpaper from the office without the Hudson view, balling it up in the corner. She can hear Matt and Foggy snarking at each other from the other room as outside, the sun begins to set. It's comforting. 

She's not sure what time it is, but she knows it's late by the time she finally finishes prying the wallpaper off in the conference room. She's tugged off her button-down and is working in her tank top when she hears Foggy muttering behind her. “Three desks,” Foggy says, pausing in his sweeping project. Darcy, wiping the windows down for the fifth time, doesn’t look around. “We’re gonna need another desk, for the secretary.”

“You’re bitching about money we don’t have and you’re thinking about secretaries?”

Foggy huffs. “Semi-distant future secretaries. So semi-distant future desk needs.”

“We should probably at least pretend we have a secretary though.” Darcy drops the cloth back into her water bucket, and prods it down with two fingers. “We can leave one of the desks in here and take secretarial shifts.”

Foggy makes a face. 

“Oh, for god’s sake.” She clambers down off of her chair. “Answering a few phone calls and making a few appointments won’t kill you. We’ll split it, Foggy. All of us,” she adds, and Matt, who’s still smoothing polish onto one of the desks, makes a thumbs up sign without looking at her. “Considering there’s only two offices, technically, one of us would have to be out here all the time anyway. At least until we get someone to sit at the entrance.”

“No, I know.” He blows hair out of his eyes. “Just—we just heard we passed. Y’know? It still doesn’t quite feel real. And now we’re thinking about secretaries.”

Darcy shudders. “Ugh, the _bar_. Don’t mention the bar. Secretaries are a step up, Foggy, seriously. We’ll work it out.”

“Speaking of working things out.” Matt pours more polish onto his rag. The tang of lemon oil stings at her nose. “When we do have a secretary, we’re going to have to split one of the offices down the middle.”

Foggy looks from Matt to Darcy to Matt again. _A fourth desk_ , Darcy adds to her notebook. _Fans. Another chair. Possibly a fake potted plant_. Then, Foggy clears his throat. “Matt and me can share, I guess.”

“The view would be lost on me,” says Matt wryly. “I don’t think that’d work.”

Foggy turns to her. “Darce?”

“You spread your shit everywhere, and I sing when I read.” She lifts her hands in a _what can you do_ gesture. “We’d both be dead in a day if we try to share again.”

“I guess we could modify the staff room into an office.” Foggy tugs on his earlobe, considering. “Though it’d be hard to get a desk in there.”

“That’d be ridiculous.” Matt starts in on the inside of the drawers. “Darcy can share with me. If you don’t mind the windows.”

Darcy blinks. “You sure? I know you have your personal space thing.”

Matt blinks. “Personal space thing?”

“Your don’t-touch-me bubble.” He still looks confused. Darcy and Foggy exchange a glance, and then Darcy adds, “Your hamster ball of introversion?”

“You do have a pretty big hamster ball, man.”

“I think at this point that whether or not I have a hamster ball—” Matt wrinkles his nose “—is irrelevant. Besides, I don’t mind the singing, unless it’s—”

“Fleetwood Mac,” say Darcy and Foggy in chorus, and then grin at each other.

“Fleetwood Mac,” Matt repeats. The corner of his mouth twitches. “Exactly.”

“That can be arranged, probably,” Darcy says. Foggy’s phone buzzes. He wipes his hands on the back of Darcy’s jacket—“ _not cool, asshole_ ”—and then digs it out of his pocket, and wandering into the conference room to answer it. Outside, the street-lights are buzzing; they’ve been cleaning for longer than she thought. Darcy glances back at Matt. “You’re sure you’ll be good with it? My roommates all hated me in college.”

“Jen likes you.” Matt shrugs, and caps off his bottle of polish. “I think I can handle it. Besides, the alternative is me carrying out two dead bodies before the end of today. It’s not that big a sacrifice.”

“True.” Still, she eyes him for a moment or two before reaching out and knocking her fist against his shoulder. “You’re not the bad sort, Murdock.”

“I’d hope not.”

“Hey, guys?” Foggy lifts his eyes from his phone. “Uh, you know how I asked Brett to let us know if anything interesting comes in?”

It takes a second to click. Darcy grabs Matt’s shoulder, and shakes him. “Oh my god.”

“Ow,” says Matt, making a face. Immediately, she lets go.

“Oh, Jesus, sorry—but oh my _god_.” She rolls her eyes to the ceiling. “God bless expensive cigars.”

“I dunno,” says Foggy, scrolling through his phone for a moment. He taps a link, and then hands his phone to Darcy. Matt heaves himself to his feet, and brushes dust off of his pants. “You might wanna hold off on that thanks until we get the full story.”

“C’mon,” says Darcy. “How bad could it be?”

.

.

.

Brett says Karen Page is suspected of murder. Darcy thinks she looks more like the women who would come into Day By Day. Her eyes are red, she’s fidgeting with the hem of her borrowed NYPD shirt, and she flinches every time someone slams a door. Very young. Their age, maybe even less. Darcy looks back at Brett, who’s watching her as if waiting for something, and says, “If that woman stabbed a man in cold blood, then I’ll eat my shoes.”

“Evidence’s pretty stacked, Darce.” Foggy goes through the folder for the fourth or tenth or millionth time, his eyebrows furrowed. Matt’s cocked his head, listening, his lips pressed into a thin line. “Daniel Fisher, dead in her apartment. No other fingerprints, no defensive wounds, and no alibi.”

Brett spreads his hands. “Badabing, badaboom.”

“She’s maybe a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, you moron,” says Darcy in disgust. “Besides, I’ve talked to women who’ve committed murder—in self-defense,” she adds, scowling at Brett, “like, ninety-eight-point-two percent of the time. They have a certain look to them. She’s—it’s different, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Hate to break it to you, Lewis, but there is that one-point-eight percent left who just kill for shits and giggles.” Brett turns his _I am a sergeant of the law_ glare on Foggy. “Gimme the file back, I’m not even supposed to be showing you that.”

Foggy gives up the file, watching it longingly as it goes.

“Who were the arresting officers?”

“Blake and Hoffman were on duty, they brought her in.” Brett makes a face. “Blake’s not my favorite guy, but he was by the book on this one. No due process violations. She hasn’t been charged yet, but it’s the weekend.”

“Lemme talk to her,” says Darcy. Foggy makes a noise like a dying hippo. “Oh, for god’s sake, Foggy, stop being so wishy-washy. You want clients, you don’t want clients, you want innocent until proven guilty, you want pure as driven snow, make up your fucking mind already. She needs a goddamn lawyer, and we can do that for her.”

“I know, I know. I just—” He sighs. “Yes. Fine. Okay. We can do this.”

Matt doesn’t say anything.

“What makes you think I’m gonna let you in there?” Brett folds his arms over his chest. “She’s supposed to be getting a lawyer appointed to her by the court.”

“Yeah, but we’re here, and they’re not.” Darcy crosses her arms, too. “Besides, you like us more. And you know we’re good.”

Brett looks pointedly at Darcy’s hair (the stripes of hair newly re-dyed gold in celebration of finishing the bar) to her hands (rings, black fingernail polish, and a curl of a tattoo emerging from under the sleeve of her suit jacket) and then to her feet (high-tops) before cocking an eyebrow.

“Don’t you even start.”

“Fine,” says Brett. “Fine. You can go in and talk to her. Her choice if she wants to take you on or not, I won’t stop her. She’s been using the fifth pretty damn exclusively, so I’d be surprised if you even get a peep out of her, but you can try. No skin off my nose.”

“You’re a peach, Brettmeister,” says Foggy. Brett rolls his eyes.

“Gimme a minute with her?” Darcy grabs her messenger bag, slinging it back over her shoulder. “She might talk to me if it’s not the three of us right off the bat.”

“Yeah, no, of course.” Foggy looks at Matt, and then back at Darcy, before holding out a fist. “Kick ass.”

She knocks his fist with her own, draws a deep breath, and then slips into the interrogation room.

Karen Page looks up from the pattern she’s tracing on the table with her forefinger. Up close, she looks less like a victim, and more like Anne Boleyn on the block, big eyes and shaking hands, waiting for her execution. She frowns, her gaze skipping from Darcy’s hair to her jewelry to her shoes, just like Brett did, before swallowing hard. She licks her lips. “Who are you?” she asks, her voice husky from crying. “Are you from the DA’s office?”

“Sort of.” Darcy looks down at the table, and then at the chairs, before dragging one of them over to Karen’s right so she can sit next to her. Karen flinches at the sound. “Sorry. I’m Darcy Lewis. With Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis? I wanted to ask you a couple of questions, if you don’t mind.”

Karen’s brow furrows. She looks like a half-drowned kitten, desperately alone. “You—you say those names like I’m supposed to know what you’re talking about.”

“In a perfect world you would already and I wouldn’t have to bribe you with the possibility of baked goods, but since it’s not a perfect world…” Darcy shrugs. “Friend of ours told us about your case. Cops been treating you okay? I can call someone in and get them to take the cuffs off you, if you want.”

Karen looks down at her wrist, and then lifts her hand, watching the handcuff shift against her skin as if she hadn’t realized it was there. _No dilated pupils_ , Darcy thinks. _She’s not coming off a high, at least_. A trip gone wrong would have helped turn the waking-up-next-to-a-dead-body story into something that made the slightest amount of sense. So would sort of psychological problem, but there had been no evidence of that in the police files. Darcy glances down at Karen Page’s hands and wrists again. No bruising, no defensive wounds. That matches her story, anyway. “Oh,” says Karen. She hasn’t noticed Darcy studying her. “No. I mean. Yes, I would like them off. But. No.”

“No, you don’t feel safe without them on?” Darcy props her chin in one hand. “Or no, you don’t trust the cops to take them off you without being assholes?”

That gets her a flicker. A smile dances around the edges of Karen’s mouth. Then it’s gone again, and Darcy wonders if she’d imagined it. “The latter,” she says. “Probably. What do you want?”

“To ask you questions, like I said.” She leans back in her chair. “To represent you, if you want us to. To figure out what happened to you, maybe try to help you put your life back together. I dunno. Take your pick, really.”

Karen’s eyes dart all over the room. They catch on the surveillance camera in the far corner, and then on the two-way mirror set into the wall. She swallows. “Who sent you?”

Darcy shrugs. “We seek where we may.”

All in an instant, Karen shifts. She sits up straighter, puts her shoulders back. Her nails dig into her palms. She _glares_. _Ah,_ Darcy thinks. _Not a kitten. A tigress._ “And why,” she says, in a voice like icicles, “would you even give a shit?”

“We need clients,” says Darcy. “You need help. Also, I think you’re innocent, but that’s neither here nor there. Can I let in my partners in, or do you want me to get you some coffee and then take a hike?”

They stare at each other. Then Karen reaches out, and grabs Darcy by the wrist. She drives her fingernails—manicure shot to hell, three of them snapped off at the quick, blood still under the rest—into Darcy’s skin. Darcy doesn’t do anything, just meets her gaze without blinking, wondering what the hell happened in the past twelve hours to make Karen Page look as though she’s frightened by kindness. Karen watches her for a long time, not speaking. Then she lets go. She swallows twice. Licks her lips.

“I don’t know if you’re crazy or if you’re just desperate,” she says, “but I’ll take the coffee. And—and help would be…nice.”

They look at each other. Darcy hooks a strand of hair behind her ear (her last haircut left her with weird, uneven bits that fall out of ponytails) and then holds out one hand. Karen looks at it for a moment, and then takes it.

“In that case,” she says, “we’d be glad to represent you, Miss Page. Do you take milk or sugar?”

Karen’s answer is a smile, shy and half-bitten off, but whole and real at the same time. In that instant, Darcy knows: _This woman is innocent, and we will prove it. We have to._

“Both,” she says. “Thank you.”

“My partners will be here to make sure they take the cuffs off you.” Darcy squeezes her hand, and then gets to her feet. “Don’t worry. Their bark is worse than their bite.”

“You’re a very odd sort of lawyer,” says Karen.

“And you’re a very odd sort of murderess, so we’re in good company.” Darcy winks. “We’ll get this fixed, Karen. I promise.”

It doesn’t occur to her, then, that not all promises can really be kept.

.

.

.

It’s nearly three in the morning by the time that they finally detach themselves from the office again, and the only people still out on the streets are either homeless, smoking, or just really daring sex workers. Foggy peels off from them two blocks away, still grumbling about Karen Page—“you two are going to be the death of me, I swear, with your—your undue fascinations with fallen women and making promises that can’t be kept”—as he heads for his apartment over the liquor store. It rained a little while they were in the interrogation room with Karen Page, and the air smells like damp paper. Darcy kicks an empty beer bottle, watching as it rolls to a stop in the gutter. Matt taps at the curb with his cane, and then steps right into a puddle.

“She seems like a nice sort of person.” Darcy hops the ledge, landing on the balls of her feet. Her high-tops are too worn for her to dare puddles anymore. She’d probably get wet socks. “You know, for someone accused of first degree murder.”

Matt shakes water off of his nice shoes. “You know she didn’t do it.”

“Well, _I_ know that, and _you_ know that, but I think Foggy and Brett need some more convincing.” She considers. “Also, you know, a jury. We need a better alternate theory than _she woke up next to the body, but she didn’t do it, your honor, I swear_.”

“We’ll work something out.” Matt sighs. “She deserves that much.”

“Aww. You like her.”

She can _hear_ him rolling his eyes. “Darcy.”

“Hey, I don’t blame you, she’s hot. Like, smoking. Awesome hair, if I do say so myself.” She tugs her hair out of the ponytail, shoves it back up out of her face. “But Foggy’s right, y’know. You and your women of mystery and danger. They’re your greatest weakness. Keep an eye on it, Murdock. You might end up royally screwed in _all_ senses of the word.”

“Hah.”

“Seriously, though.” Darcy hops over a puddle. “You think she’s innocent, too?”

“Yeah.” Matt shrugs. “She just—she doesn’t sound like she’s lying about Daniel Fisher. I don’t know how else to explain it, but she doesn’t.” He turns his face towards her. “Why do you think she’s innocent?”

“Because she doesn’t act like a woman who just killed someone,” says Darcy. “I know not all psych profiles are the same, but—I dunno. Something about her doesn’t fit, that’s all. Foggy sees it too. He’s just—”

“—a worrywart.” Matt smiles a little. “I know.”

They walk in silence for a little while. There aren’t many taxis out this time of night, especially not in Hell’s Kitchen; otherwise she’d just flag one down. Something about the wind makes her think it’s going to start raining again in a minute.

“Hey,” says Matt. She glances at him sideways. “Can I ask you something?”

“Matt, you have rubbed my back while I was puking into a toilet bowl after a very long night in burlesque clubs,” she says. “You don’t have to ask to ask me things. I thought we had gone over this.”

He snorts, and goes quiet again for a moment. Then he says, “If she had done it, would you still have wanted to take the case?”

“Karen?” Darcy shakes her head. “Obvious culprit, no money to pay? No. The DA’s office can handle stuff like that. I’d rather work the case knowing we’re not going to make money out of it, and make sure someone innocent gets off, rather than take a case with some murderous psychopath who also can’t give us shit for our time.”

They’ve crossed two streets before Matt speaks again.

“I’m glad you didn’t take the job with Day By Day. If it helps.”

Darcy blinks. Then she ducks her head, hiding a smile behind her hair. “Even though you’re stuck with me sharing your office?”

“Even though you sing Fleetwood Mac,” says Matt seriously. Darcy snorts. Then she loops her arm through his, and squeezes.

“I’m glad I stuck around, too.” She pinches the back of his wrist. “And not just because of the tea that Foggy stole from the financial people.”

“I hope not.” Matt wrinkles his nose. “It’s shitty tea.”

“It is, isn’t it? Shitty tea. I feel like we should—ah, shit.”

Her phone’s buzzing. Darcy unhooks herself from Matt, and starts digging through her bag. “Sorry, it’s probably Jen. She must be wondering where I am.”

“No, it’s fine.”

She hates her phone right now. Darcy swipes it open, and puts it to her ear, looping her arm through Matt’s again. There’s a guy sitting on a stoop on the opposite side of the street giving them a _look_. “Hey, Jen.”

“It’s four in the morning,” says Jen, her voice croaking from lack of sleep. “And you are not home yet.”

“Sorry. We—uh.” She can’t fight her grin. “Had to go to the 15th. We have a case. Sort of. Also, it's only, like, three.”

“Don't be a pedant. How do you have a case, sort of?”

“It’s complicated, I’ll tell you later.” She glances up at the sky, and then at Matt. “I’m fine. Matt’s walking me back. All’s good. I won’t see you before you leave in the morning but, you know. I’ll knock on your door when I come in?”

“You are making my hair turn p-prematurely grey.” Jen harrumphs. “Darla keeps biting my feet.”

“Kick her out of the room, then. She’s your cat.”

“She’s your cat when she bites. We’ve t-talked about this.”

“Just give her some treats or something, I don’t know. Strangle her with a shoelace. We’ll get some peace and quiet.”

Matt twiddles his fingers at her, and then says in a low voice, “My place is closer, just sleep on the couch.”

Darcy covers the phone with her hand for a moment. “Your couch has the billboard of doom.”

Matt gives her a look over the top of his glasses. She’s still not sure how he manages to do it, considering he can’t actually focus on her, but it’s worked since undergrad and it works now. Darcy puts the phone back to her ear. “Actually, I’m just gonna stay with Matt. I’ll see you when you get home tomorrow?”

“I th-thought you said it was impossible to sleep in Matt’s apartment.” There’s a rustling sound. “Son of a _b-bitch_. Darla, you little shit.”

“We named her after a vampire for a reason, Jen, darling.” She can hear sirens in the distance. “And I’ll manage. I think there are those eye-cover thingies at the CVS at the end of the street. I can even blindfold myself if I have to, I’m sure Matt has something somewhere.”

Matt pinches her in the ribs. Darcy squirms.

“Get out of my room.” A door slams on the other end of the line. “T-text me when you get there.”

“Can do, boss lady.” She smiles. “Good night, Jen.”

Jen grunts, and hangs up.

If she actually stops to think about it (and she does, later, but that _later_ is much, much later, when she’s learned things and seen things and done things that she could never have imagined herself doing, that night stepping over puddles) it seems extraordinarily convenient that Matt’s apartment is only three blocks away from Nelson, Murdock & Lewis. Darcy pries her shoes off her feet, and then peels off her socks, too. She hasn’t escaped the puddles, unfortunately. “God, I hate that goddamn billboard,” she says, as Matt undoes his scarf and hangs it on the peg. “I feel like I should just—I don’t know. Stab the Coors Lite marketing people in the face. Like, constantly.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” He shucks his coat. “You want a beer?”

“Fuck yes.”

She texts Jen ( _safe, call you tomorrow_ ) and then Foggy _(TURN OFF VICIOUS AND GO TO SLEEP_ ) before dropping down onto the couch, turning so her back is against the arm and she’s not being blinded by the ads. There was a kid she knew in her freshman math class who claimed he could hack into the motherboards of automatic billboards; maybe she could reprogram this one to just play the Fruity Oaty Bars commercial, over and over again. At least then it would be something she vaguely enjoys. Matt hands her the beer (or offers it in her general direction, at least) and then finds his way to the chair opposite her. “So. Alternate theories. Lay it on me, legal counsel.”

“Ugh, we’re doing this now?” She cracks the top of the beer, and sets the lid on the coffee table so nobody steps on it. “It’s like three in the morning, Matt.”

He shrugs. “Insomnia.”

“You fall asleep at the drop of a hat.” Still, she kind of gets it. She’s not sure she could fall asleep even if she tried it. Not right now, not with the way her blood is pumping. _A case,_ she thinks. _We actually have a goddamn case._ “Best case scenario? She’s being set up. Worst case? Head trauma, some kind of drug, maybe. We should probably sweet talk Brett into letting us bring a doctor in, have them check her out. Just in case, y’know? If there _is_ a drug in her system, it’ll be flushed out by the end of the day tomorrow, and then no dice.”

Matt sets his beer on the table, and takes off his glasses. “Drugs like a date rape drug?”

“If I wasn’t so sure she was innocent, then yeah. Date rape drug. He could have doped her, convinced her to take him back to her place while she was out of it. Assaulted her. Sometimes the drugs don’t react well, though. Sometimes people get mad. Sometimes they get crazy. If the circumstances weren’t what they were, if she hadn’t invited him out?” Darcy shrugs. “I would have said unconscious self-defense, protecting herself from a would-be rapist. But that’s not what we have here.” She takes a sip of her beer. “What would Landman and Zack do?”

“Not take it at all.” He sounds more bitter than pissed. “She can’t afford it, so they wouldn’t be interested in the first place.”

“Assholes.” 

He scoffs. “Won’t argue with that one.”

“God, I wouldn’t want to be her right now.” Darcy frowns. “Not because of the murder charge thing, but just—I couldn’t imagine going back to my apartment. Not with something like that hanging over me.” She considers. Maybe Karen Page will need a new place. There’s no harm in helping her look, really. If Karen was crazy enough to let them represent her for free, then maybe she can be crazy enough to help a murder suspect get back on her feet.

God, if she tells anyone that, Jen will _kill_ her.

Matt doesn’t hear her. She can tell by the way he’s staring at the window, listening to the buzz of the billboard. Outside, it starts to rain again. “She hadn’t been charged, had she?”

“Hm? No.” Darcy frowns. “You really think it means something that they haven’t charged her yet?”

“The evidence is pretty damning, don’t you think? Only reason you wouldn’t charge in a situation like that would be if—”

“—you didn’t want a paper trail,” Darcy finishes. Matt nods. “I’ll agree that it’s weird, but for now I kind of want to work with what we have, rather than with theories. It’s our first case, Matt, I don’t want to take a walk on the wild side just yet.”

“No, I get it. I just—” He stops. “I don’t know.”

“You’re making the Matt-has-a-hunch face.” Darcy sighs. “You’re making that face that says you don’t actually get it but you’re saying you are because you want me to stop trying to convince you otherwise, because you have an idea. It’s your hunch face. Usually the hunch face means bad things. And awkward things. Bad and awkward things.”

“Yeah, but usually my hunches are right.”

“ _Bad and awkward things_ , Matthew. Think of how Foggy and I suffer for your hunches before you, you know. Hunch.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “Suffering, huh.”

“So you’re saying you don’t have a hunch face?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Matt huffs a laugh. “Seeing my own expressions is a bit beyond me.”

“Bullshit. You know you have a hunch face. You just don’t want to admit it.” Darcy drains her beer, and heaves herself up off the couch. Matt drops his head to the back of the chair, closing his eyes. In the kitchen, Darcy rinses the beer bottle, and throws it into the recycling box underneath the sink. “Can I steal a shirt or something? I don’t want to sleep in this.”

Matt waves a hand at her, lazily. Darcy decides that’s permission, and dries her hands. “Cheers. Can I use your Topeka shirt?”

“Wh—no.” He turns his face towards her. “Why do you like that shirt so much?”

“I don’t know. It’s big and comfy and yet somehow makes my boobs look awesome?”

Matt chokes on his swallow of beer.

No part of Matt’s apartment is as spare and undecorated as his room. The bed squats in the middle, a little table on each side, and there’s a closet set into the wall, but other than that, there’s nothing. She opens the closet door and sorts through the clothes for a moment (they’re neatly organized by texture rather than color, though Matt tends to be fairly monochrome by design) and then yanks out one of the oversized Columbia t-shirts that Foggy likes to give as shitty holiday presents, acting like they aren’t cast-offs from his old job in the uni bookstore. Darcy hangs her jacket on one of the closet hooks, and yanks her tank up over her head, draping it over the top of the closet door instead. (Oh. Snoopy tank. Totally classy to wear for the acquisition of their first real case.) The Columbia shirt is clean, aside from one or two paint flecks from when she’d dragged her boys into helping Jen repaint the apartment. It smells like laundry soap. She tugs it on.

“How did that thing go?” Matt calls from the other room.

Her leggings join the shirt. “What thing?”

“The blind date thing.”

“Oh.” Darcy pads to the bathroom, wetting down a washcloth. “Kinda sucked, actually. He was a financial specialist or something, I stopped listening as soon as he mentioned he was temporarily separated from his husband.”

“He actually said that?” She can _hear_ the way he’s rolling his eyes. “Jesus.”

“He said that he wasn’t married, but his phone blew up the whole time with texts from someone marked _Hubby_ and the asshole had his wedding ring in his pocket. I saw it when he yanked his wallet out and it fell on the table.”

He snorts again. Darcy scrubs at her eyes until most of the make-up’s gone, wishing she’d thought to grab remover wipes from the CVS downstairs, and then snags the silk weave blanket off the end of Matt’s bed. He hasn’t moved an inch. Still lolling about like a sleepy cat, she thinks, and perches on the arm of his chair to knock her elbow into his temple affectionately. “So, yeah. Blind date was terrible. Too pathetic to even sexify. I’m gonna kill Zeke for setting it up. How about you? Foggy told me about the violent paralegal.”

“Jesus Christ.” He drapes an arm over his eyes. “Foggy thinks way too much about my sex life.”

“I think he’s trying to live vicariously.” She turns on her perch, and shoves her bare toes under his leg. Matt makes a noise that’s more whimper than squeal, and lets out a long breath through his nose. “You look like hell, seriously.”

“I’ll be fine.” He cracks a smile at her, eyes still closed. “You can use the shower if you want.”

“Nah, I’ll just do it when I get home tomorrow.” She throws the blanket onto the couch. “Go to bed, Matt. I’m gonna try to sleep.”

“Nah. I’ll stay out here. You use the bedroom.”

Darcy frowns at him. “Matt.”

“Billboard, remember?” Matt prods her feet out from underneath his thigh, and then stretches. “Besides, I want to go over the recording from the station one more time. It’d keep you up if you tried to sleep out here.”

“You are such a bullshitter.” Darcy slips off the edge of the chair. “Fine. But this is the last time.”

He flicks his fingers at her in a _yeah, yeah_ sort of motion, and goes to dig the tape recorder out of her bag.

She falls asleep to the burbling murmur of the digital recording, her arms wrapped tightly around the pillow that smells the least like Matt.

.

.

.

The phone blares at barely four am, and Darcy snaps out of a nightmare with her legs all the way off the mattress, and her arms pinwheeling into the sheets. She can smell espresso and leftover Thai food, and it’s so nostalgic that for a moment she could swear she’s late for class. Then she gropes for her phone, and gouges her elbow on the corner of the bedside table. “God fucking _dammit_!”

“You okay?” Matt sounds depressingly chipper. Darcy wonders how many coffees he’s had already. When she looks around, he’s leaning his shoulder against the door frame, smirking at her as if he can tell that the shirt is half off her shoulder and she’s sitting flat on her ass with a bloody elbow and her hair tangled in front of her eyes. “Sounds like you fell pretty hard.”

“Your furniture wants me dead,” she says sourly, and grabs a Kleenex, folding it up to pad it against her elbow. The phone stops ringing. Matt sips at his coffee, still smirking.

“Be nice to it? I don’t want to find new things. Not this late into our relationship.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”

Darcy checks her elbow again. Her phone starts shrieking. She hits speaker, and then says, “Foggy, I swear to Christ, I’m going to fucking _end_ you.”

“Get to the police station, someone tried to kill our client.”

Foggy hangs up without another word. Darcy closes her eyes. _Jesus_. “Lucifer fuck me up the ass with a pitchfork,” she says, and then looks up at Matt. “Help me up.”

“You break your knee?” he asks, but he comes forward and puts a hand down anyway. Darcy has to lean forward to grab it, but grab it she does, and heaves herself to her feet again. “Who was it?”

“Foggy.” She peels the Kleenex away from her elbow, and then tosses it in the trash. “Someone attacked Karen. He said—he said someone tried to kill her. He needs us down at the station.”

Matt presses his lips tight together. One hand clenches into a fist. There are words hanging in the air, unsaid. _No charge. No friends. No one to care if she dies._ A dead body and an innocent woman. It all screams set-up. More than set-up, it screams _cover_ -up, and no offense to Matt or Foggy but she’s pretty sure that if she stayed at Day By Day, her first real case wouldn’t be like this.

Then she thinks of poor sad Karen Page, and toughens up. Darcy hooks her hair up into a ponytail. “Gimme five minutes to change and then we can go.”

“Coffee’ll be ready by the time you’re out,” Matt says.

“Yeah,” says Darcy. “Thanks.”

They walk into a shouting match.  It’s not hard to find Foggy, even in the crowd of plainclothes cops trying to subtly gawk at Brett reaming out two guys with badges on their belts. Foggy’s placed himself firmly in front of a door marked “interrogation,” eyes fixed on the laptop he’s holding in one arm, jabbering away into the phone he has pressed to his ear. “—don’t _care_ what time it is, Janice, have charges been filed against this woman or not?”

“I would hazard a guess not, considering.” Matt tips his head. “Where is she?”

“Yes, I’ll hold.” Foggy looks up at them through his hair. He’s forgotten to brush it back in his rush to get here, and now it’s scattering everywhere in some Harry Potter shit. “It’s about time you two showed up, I need to get Brett to stop yelling at her arresting officers so we can yell at them instead. She’s in here.”

“One of us should stay with her.” Darcy takes Foggy’s computer and tucks it under her arm. “Matt?”

“I’ll go with Foggy.”

“There’s an officer in there to keep an eye on her, Perez, or something. I tried to get them to just leave her alone and keep an eye on the CCTV but no dice. I haven’t heard any screaming or struggles, so the likelihood of finding a dead body is negligible.” Foggy claps her on the shoulder, seizes Matt by the arm, and disappears into the crowd, his computer forgotten. Darcy knocks twice on the marbled glass inlay, and then sticks her head in.

“I come in peace.”

Karen lifts her head from her arms, and is away from the table in an instant. Her lip is split, her throat is raw and purple, and there’s a faint bruise around her right eye. The officer, Perez, leaves her chair in the corner, dropping a hand to her piece. “What’s your name?”

Darcy rolls her eyes. “I’m her lawyer.” She looks back to Karen. “This is a dumb question, but are you okay?”

She’s right: it is a dumb question. It’s so dumb Karen ignores it. “I thought it was just Mr. Nelson out there.”

 _Mr. Nelson._ Jesus. “We’re all here. Matt and I were just late.” Karen’s shivering. Darcy slides off her jacket and offers it to her, and Karen takes it with one hand, her arm bent away from her body as if to keep the vulnerable parts of herself as far away from Darcy as possible. Darcy doesn’t take it personally. She turns to Perez instead. “Can I have the room with my client, please?”

Officer Perez stiffens. “I’m here on protection.”

“I’m her lawyer,” Darcy says again. “Sergeant Mahoney will vouch for me if you’re really worried. But seriously, this place is locked down. No windows to break through, and there’s no way anybody’s gonna get in here if you guard the door, now is there?”

Karen’s eyes flick back and forth between Darcy and Perez. Darcy keeps the smile wide on her face until Perez can’t hold her gaze anymore; the officer drops her hand away from her gun, and then leaves the room without another word, slamming the door behind her. The noise makes Karen flinch, even under the jacket. Darcy nudges the second chair out of the way, and boosts herself up onto the table, crossing her ankles and setting Foggy’s computer aside. If she remembers right, there’s a recording program on his laptop, and if Karen says anything important, she wants to have it handy.

“Did she do anything to you?”

Karen shakes her head. “She just watched me. Kinda creepy, but she didn’t…” She rubs her arms, and glances up at the CCTV camera for a flicker of a second. She’s not very good at hiding things, is Karen Page. Darcy settles the laptop on her knees. Foggy’s looking up previous police brutality suits, in New York State and elsewhere. He even has something up on Eric Garner. “She didn’t do anything,” Karen says, and Darcy glances at her over the tops of her glasses.

“How’s your throat?”

Her lips curve up into a ghost of the smile. “It hurts,” says Karen. “Like someone tried to choke me.”

Darcy makes a face. “Ask a stupid question. They get a doctor in here to take a look at you?”

Karen snorts. “They’d have to actually give a damn to think of stuff like that.”

It’s sad—horribly, rage-inducingly sad—but it’s true, and that stings. Darcy shifts, pulling up the recording program on Foggy’s computer. “So that’s a no, then.”

“Yeah, that’s a no.”

“Y’know, this is what made Ferguson explode.” Darcy pauses. “Well, if you disregard the whole systemic persecution of a race and just figure in the police abuse, anyway.”

Karen curls into herself, rubbing her throat. “So, what’s the plan now, legal counsel?”

“Foggy and Matt are working on getting you out of here, and I’m on guard duty until they manage it.” Darcy spins the laptop around, and settles it on the table. Karen stares at the screen. “I was gonna ask you if you’d be willing to tell me what happened.”

Karen’s brow furrows. “So you can record it?”

“I want to be able to keep it in evidence.” Darcy shrugs. “Hearsay doesn’t go over well in court. If you don’t want to talk about it right away, that’s fine, but it’s better to do this sooner rather than later. You need to make sure your side of the story gets heard.”

Karen looks at the computer for a minute or two. Then she nods, as if she’s made some sort of decision, and takes her chair again. Her fingers curl into the sleeves of Darcy’s jacket. Darcy hits the record button. “I was asleep,” she says, slowly. “The cop—he put a hand over my mouth. He grabbed the sheets, twisted them around my—around my neck. Tried to choke me.” Her fingers dust over her throat. There’s blood under her nails. “I—I couldn’t—I couldn’t breathe. He kept saying something, apologizing, I think. Over and over. I could barely hear him. I was trying to scream, to breathe. I scratched his eye, I think. I must have hurt him, because he let me go.” She picks at her fingernails. “And then I screamed, and the others showed up.”

“What others?”

“The other guards.”

Darcy rubs a thumb over her lower lip. “How many were there?”

“Two, I think. Three maybe.” Karen shrugs. “I don’t know. I was crying, I couldn’t see very well.”

“You know who they were?”

Karen shrugs again. Then she looks at the computer, and says, “No. I didn’t—I didn’t hear any names.”  

 _Names_ , Darcy writes on the inside of her wrist. _Dates_. If they manage to get this to go to trial, anyway.

“Do you know if you’ve been charged yet?”

Karen shakes her head. “Nobody’s charged me with anything. I don’t—I don’t think they even read me my rights or anything. They just put me in the cell and walked away.”

“Did they ask you anything about Daniel Fisher?”

She shakes her head one last time, and bends her head so her hair falls in front of her face. “She shook her head,” says Darcy. “For the record. What time did they find you in your apartment, Karen?”

“Um.” Karen frowns. “Maybe—maybe three am, I guess? We—I remember it was about nine o’clock in the bar, and by the time I—found Daniel, it was maybe two. Why?”

“Legally, unless you’re charged, they should have released you—what time does the computer say?”

“Three-forty.”

“They should have released you forty minutes ago. If my math’s right, anyway.” Darcy’s hands are trembling a little. She swallows back acid, digging her nails into her palms. “I’m going to pause the recording for a minute,” she says, and then hits the space bar. “Do you want anything?”

“I’m fine.” She stares at the table. “I’m just…I don’t know.”

 _I hope you took that bastard’s eye out_ , Darcy thinks, looking at her. She doesn’t say it, because the camera’s watching, but she thinks it. “We’ll get you out of here, all right? Just…hold tight for a minute. We’ll see this through, I promise you.”

Karen jerks, and lifts her head. Her eyes are shiny, her lips white. She swallows. “I wish I could believe that,” she says, and her voice cracks. “I really, really do.”

Darcy looks at her for a long moment. Then she turns on the tabletop, until she’s facing Karen rather than just peering at her sideways. She holds out both hands. Karen looks at them, then up at Darcy, before taking them. Her fingers are bone dry and frigid, and when Darcy squeezes, she has to visibly stop herself from wrenching away.

“You don’t have to believe me right now.” Darcy doesn’t smile. “It doesn’t change the fact that I’m glad you’re alive.”

Karen’s hands go slack. Her lips part. For a second, Darcy thinks she’s going to cry. Then, slowly, she curls her hands into Darcy’s, until she’s squeezing hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

“You can trust us, Karen,” she says.

Karen doesn’t say anything at all.

.

.

.

Of course Matt’s the one who volunteers to put her up for the night. She’d be disgusted, if she hadn’t been half-expecting it. Foggy catches her eye and rolls his, and all Darcy can do is laugh. She trusts Matt not to do something stupid like sleep with a client, but at the same time it’s not the wisest decision that they’ve ever made. And she does include herself and Foggy in that decision-making, because they’re the idiots who _let_ a poor traumatized woman wander off with Matt Murdock.

Okay, that sounds like she thinks he’ll take advantage, which he won’t, because he’s Matt. But it _looks_ bad. It feels like a mistake.

“This feels like a mistake,” says Foggy, as soon as the door is shut behind them, and they’re alone in the office. Darcy scruffs a hand through her hair, and sighs.

“I don’t want to think about it.” She yanks his laptop out of her messenger bag, and shoves it at him. “I’m gonna catch a cab. If I don’t get at least three hours of sleep I’m going to go back to the police station and I’m going to stab that bastard in the dick.”

“I’m _so_ glad I turned off the tape recorder before you said that.” Foggy sets his laptop on the desk. “Sleep on my couch, seriously. Or you could make a nest out of old sheets from the closet down the hall, but that sounds vaguely unsanitary.”

“I was _going_ to sleep on Matt’s couch, until this happened.” Darcy heaves her bag back up onto her shoulder again. “I don’t know if couches are good luck right now.”

“My couch smells like Cheetos and old pizza, it’s like…the least unlucky couch ever.”

Darcy snorts. “I _can_ walk the six blocks back to my apartment, you know.”

“Darcy, we just spent an hour in a police station because our client was nearly _murdered in her cell_. By a cop, no less. Let me be a worrywart. Okay?”

She huffs. Still, she’s too tired to say no. Darcy nods, and hooks her earbuds around her neck. “Fine. But you better buy doughnuts, because I’m gonna smell like Cheetos and old pizza when I wake up.”

“There is no better smell in the universe,” says Foggy, and she punches him in the arm.

.

.

.

She’s going to _kill_ Karen for wandering off on her own. That’s all she has to say on the matter. Even with the devil of Hell’s Kitchen in the mix, she’s going to _murder Karen dead._

.

.

.

“I saw him,” Karen tells her in a whisper, as Darcy helps her unpack her groceries onto the counter in the little staff-room at the office. She blinks, and cocks her head.

“Saw who?”

“The devil of Hell’s Kitchen.” Karen curls a strand of hair around her finger, thoughtfully. She looks—she doesn’t look frightened, exactly. More awed, as if she’s seen a shooting star, or a triple rainbow. “I just—I know I told you, but it doesn’t quite feel real. He saved my life, Darcy.”

“That’s kind of his job, from what I’m gathering.” Darcy drops a handful of forks onto the counter. “What was he like? The devil.”

“Quiet.” Karen shrugs. “He didn’t say anything, really. Well, aside from when he took my flash drive.” Her eyes skip away from Darcy’s as she says it. She’s still guilty about the lie, Darcy realizes, even though it probably saved their lives that first time they came into the police station. _Karen Page, you utter darling._ “Tall. He had a nice voice.”

“Oh, _really_.”

“You say that like I’m a teenage girl with a crush,” says Karen, but the tips of her ears are flaming. Darcy very kindly does not point this out, and scrounges the spatula from the bottom of the bag.

“He’s been getting a lot more active lately. According to stuff like _The Enquirer_ , anyway, which I always take with a grain of salt.” She goes to stick her finger into the top of the casserole, and Karen smacks her hand. “Ow. But…I dunno. I thought he was an urban myth, I guess.”

“There was a story from these teenage girls, the ones who were nearly taken for slavery? They saw him, too. And none of them were drugged or anything, it was pretty legitimate so far as I could tell.”

“He just dumped the guy who attacked you on the doorstep of the _Bulletin_ with the USB taped to his chest.” Darcy frowns. “This dude goes around beating the shit out of bad guys. He doesn’t seem to have a plan, really, he just kind of—goes half-cocked. I wonder.”

Karen blinks. “Hm?”

“Does he actually investigate shit? Like…he seems to know when things happen, like with the girls on the docks. Stuff like that takes more than just stumbling across it. Smugglers are secretive, they have their reputation for a reason.” She taps her chin. “Half the guys he throws to the police end up back on the street because of the tainted evidence. I wonder if he knows that.”

“I feel like he would.” Karen presses her lips tight together. “I don’t even know how he knew about me. Union Allied was trying so hard to keep it quiet.”

“Maybe he has moles in the police station. It wouldn’t surprise me.” Darcy laughs. “Maybe I should spray-paint a sign on the wall. _Dear Devil, if you need legal counsel, please call this number._ ”

“Somehow, I don’t think a guy like him takes legal counsel.”

“Probably not, but he can’t exactly show up in court to testify that he saw this happen on this day and then punched that asshole in the face.” She heaves the plates up into her arms. “I’m just saying, it might be a good idea for him to stop wandering around solo and start, y’know, building a network. Not with me, obviously, or with the firm, but like…in general. I wonder if he knows that.”

“Well.” Karen checks the casserole again, and then digs salt and pepper shakers out of her purse. “If I see him again, I’ll tell him you said that.”

“I love having someone with a private line to a vigilante, it makes taking vengeance on exes so much easier.”

Karen snorts, and touches the bottom of the casserole dish before nodding. “There. I think we’re okay.”

“I feel like I should object to the fact that we’re the ones in the kitchen while the boys are the ones out waiting for the food.” Darcy collects the forks, and Karen heaves the casserole into her arms. “It feels very stereotypical and Stepford-ish.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Stepford,” says Foggy from the other room, and Darcy resolves to throw a tennis ball at his head at the nearest opportunity. “At least Matt has an excuse, lucky bastard.”

“Matt can carry things same as anyone else. He’s just a shit that likes to pretend otherwise.” Darcy knocks her hip into Matt’s arm as she sets a plate in front of him, and tosses Foggy’s fork at him. He fumbles it, and it hits the table with a clatter. “Oops. Sorry.”

“Welcome to the firm,” says Matt, laughingly. “Population: insanity.”

“I gathered that, believe it or not,” says Karen with a bit of a smile.

“We will still be charging you,” says Foggy, because Foggy’s an idiot, albeit a lovable one. “You know. As soon as we actually. Figure out how to do that. Because we’re fails.”

“Be nice to the lady making us food, Foggy.” Darcy tips into her chair. “Oh, Karen, I wanted to ask you—my cousin and I live a few blocks away from here. She and I talked about it, and if you need somewhere to stay, y’know, while you get your apartment cleaned up and stuff, you can sleep on our couch or something. As long as you’re not allergic to cats.”

Karen jumps. Her wide-eyed look is almost kittenish, it’s so startled. Then she bites her lip, as if she’s trying not to cry. “You—I couldn’t accept that, you barely know me—”

“I feel like our forced companionship in police headquarters has forged a bond, y’know?” Darcy takes a bite of casserole, and then moans a little. “Also, we need you for your food. Literally the only reason why I’m asking. Please, please move in and cook for us forever, because I am foodgasming.”

Behind his glasses, Matt rolls his eyes.

“Well—I mean— ” Karen flutters. “Only if it’s not a bother. I don’t want to make any trouble or anything—”

“Darcy,” says Foggy, pointing his fork in Darcy’s direction, “is the laziest person on the planet. She’s only inviting you to clean up her mess of an apartment. Don’t think she’s being all cute and altruistic here, because she’s a _terrible_ person.”

“Shut up and eat, Foggy,” says Darcy, and Karen covers her mouth with one hand to hide her smile. Her throat is still mottled with bruises, and there’s a bit of a lump on her temple from when the guy at her apartment threw her into the wall, but her eye is much better, and her hands are unmarked. More than that, she _looks_ better; like she’s not carrying the weight of a secret any longer. It brings a flush to her cheeks and a sparkle to her eye that had been missing in the police station, and it’s nice to see.

“I’m not allergic to cats.” Karen serves herself last, like a good hostess. Darcy wonders where she came from, before she moved to the city. She doesn’t have an accent, really, but some of the ways she moves, her mannerisms, scream Midwest or very northern South. “And I wouldn’t—I mean. It’d only be for a few days, until the cleaners are done. If I can afford cleaners. And I don’t mind mess, at all.”

“Well, that’s good, because Darcy and Jen don’t clean at all. Like, _ever_. Ow!”

Darcy lifts her heel from Foggy’s foot. “It’s not as bad as he makes it sound.”

“Speaking of cleaning.” Karen’s lips twitch. “I noticed you guys are in a bit of a bind. You know, with billing, and things. I—I can’t pay you back, not with money, but maybe I could help you get on your feet? Until you, you know, take off.”

“Are you saying you want to work for us?” Matt tilts his head. “What are your qualifications?”

Darcy waves her fork. “Other than a badass casserole and truly Avenger-like survival instincts.”

“I was a secretary at Union Allied for five years; I’m pretty sure I can get a baby law office up on its feet without much trouble.” Karen winks at Darcy. “Plus there’s the virgin casserole thing.”

“Sounds like we have a secretary,” says Foggy. He lifts his glass of water. “To secretarial duties! Printers and staplers and budgeting and—finding a fourth desk, because I’m pretty sure we’re gonna need one.”

“To secretaries,” says Karen, laughing, and they tap their glasses together.

Later, she thinks it's odd that Matt spent most of the lunch not-staring at the window, rubbing his jaw as if he's deep in thought. But other than that, she doesn't think much of it at all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Springtime For Hitler" is a song from _The Producers_ which you should watch. The old one, not the new one. Because oh my _god_. 
> 
> In New York state it can take up to six months to hear back from the bar exam as to whether or not you passed, thus the long jump between the last chapter and this one.
> 
> Brett and Darcy had a two-week affair that ended badly and it shows. 
> 
> When you're arrested, you _must_ be charged in order to remain in police custody. That charge _must_ be made within twenty-four hours in New York State (48 hours in California, 72 for other states), otherwise the police are legally obligated to release you. If you are interrogated and not placed in a courtroom within six hours of that interrogation, you _must_ be released, according to the McNabb-Mallory rule of 1996. The cops must also release you if they fail to provide you with a lawyer if you ask for it, violate due process by interrogating you without informing you of your rights, et cetera. Most of what happens to Karen in Daredevil could give the NYPD one hell of a civil lawsuit. 
> 
> I skipped around a little bit, transition-wise, but I feel like you guys didn't need a three-sentence overview of "oh, Karen went to grab the flash drive and was nearly killed except for the devil of hell's kitchen!" So there's that decision. 
> 
> Darcy does have a plot of her own in this! The seeds were sewn (rather obviously, I feel) in this chapter, but there are some other interweavings with canon events that I want to do. Jen will also become a bit more involved as Darcy's plot develops, so there's that. ^^ Also, this fic does take place from Darcy's POV, though I may do one or two little bits from Wesley's or Vanessa's, just so we know how Wilson's people are reacting to this irritating brunette lawyer. (She gets their dander up, but maybe not how you would expect.)
> 
> I'm so overwhelmed by the response to The Price of War!! You guys are amazing and I love you to pieces. Thank you especially to inspired2013, who informed me of the technicalities, timelines, and insanities of law school. I've taken some criminal justice classes, but that tends to focus more on amendment rights, cop shenanigans, and due process than how long it takes for you to get a law degree in the US! 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this chapter!


	3. The Devil You Know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MAJOR TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR: Transphobia, abuse, rape, discussion of rape, discussion of transphobia, mentions of suicide, explicit questioning of an individual's rape experience, and Daredevil-level violence/assault. There is also some explicit language. If you don't want to see any of this, basically skip from "I'm a longwinded asshat" to "nailing Rich Goodman's balls to the wall." for the rape, suicide, and transphobic bits, and from the rando guy saying "When do I get paid?" to "“Wait,” says Darcy," for the violence bits.
> 
> UNBETA'ED. SORRY NOT SORRY.

It takes her an hour and a half to convince herself that she can get out of bed the next morning.

Darcy presses her thumbs into her eyes, hating the little pinches of agony behind her sockets. She hates the light more. She’s pretty sure she’s mashed up in a Foggy Nelson/Karen Page sandwich of some sort, which would bother her if she wasn’t still more than a little drunk. Besides, they’re warm, she can’t remember any shenanigans, and her underwear is still firmly in place, so this in and of itself is made of win.

After about half an hour of staring at the ceiling, though, she gets a little more sober, and she realizes that if she lies here any longer she’s not going to make it in to work. It seems like a shitty precedent to set, not showing up on the _third day_ into their new premises, no matter how tempting it is. In his sleep, Foggy mumbles something that sounds like the word “pancake” and rolls over to squash her. Darcy shoves him away, settles a body pillow between him and Karen—Darcy may have practice waking up with a Nelson, but Karen doesn’t, and Darcy doesn’t want her to panic and run—and then heaves herself up and into the bathroom just in time to puke her guts out.

Today is one of those miracle days when Jen can do all her work from home, and so when Darcy finally creeps her way into the kitchen it’s to a smug-looking Darla picking chicken bits from in between Jen’s fingers. Jen gives Darcy the over-the-top-of-the-reading-glasses look that makes Darcy want to choke something. Darcy eases herself slowly into the chair, lays her head in her arms, and says, “Kfgkd.”

“You’re up early,” says Jen, pinching another bit of chicken off her breakfast burrito and letting Darla lick it off her fingernails. The microwave reads 8:49. “Did you actually sleep at all?”

“Mmfphrgl,” says Darcy, and burps.

“You brought home puppies, too, I noticed.”

“Guh.” Darcy flips her off. “No talking. Coffee.”

“T-two feet to your left,” says Jen, and miracle of miracles there it is, her “this mug is funny because it has cute shit on it” mug, steaming and already waiting. There’s a fairly pointed glass of water on the counter, too, along with a few ibuprofen. Darcy swallows them down, and then curls into the mug, watching Darla lick her evil little teeth and go onto her hind legs to make snatching motions at Jen’s burrito. Jen lifts it higher without looking, and licks a bit of salsa from the paper. It’s from Tito’s food cart, the one at the end of their block, the one who weaves cocaine or _something_ into his tortillas because there’s no natural way they can be that fucking good. Darcy knocks her head against the table.

“Ngh.”

“How was the b-blast from the proverbial past?” Jen shoves Darla off of the table, and puts her burrito down. “You haven’t been that drunk in a long time.”

“It was fucking awesome, thank you.” Darcy takes a very tentative sip of coffee, and then a bolder one when her stomach only flips over once in response. Jen grabs her another glass of water. “Karen was feeling shitty, so alcohol was needed. We went to the fish market.”

“Excellent choice.” Jen pushes a file across the table at her. “You have a two o’clock.”

Darcy looks at the file. Then at Jen. Then at the file again. She frowns. “No handouts.”

“D-don’t be ridiculous.” Jen stirs sugar into her tea. The clink of spoon on ceramic makes Darcy’s head throb. “Nothing wrong with accepting help at the start, Darcy. Besides, this c-case is something you’re good at.”

“Jen.”

“Take it or d-don’t, but you have the two o’clock either way. Coffee shop on 43rd and 10th. She’ll meet you by the windows. She’s a bit fragile.” Jen gives Darcy another look. “You might want to shower before you go, you smell like a d-distillery.”

“Thanks, Jenny.”

Jen rolls her eyes, and presses a kiss to the top of Darcy’s head. Then she slips away towards the living room, Darla trotting along at her heels.

It’s with her darkest sunglasses, her comfiest shoes, and approximately a fuckton of make-up that Darcy breaks off from Foggy and Karen (who head on to the office, grumbling a little and moaning about their headaches) and makes her way to Mug Shots. The file rests against her hip in her college messenger bag (it has the N7 insignia on it, so sue her) as she orders her third coffee of the day and then settles in with her headphones over her ears. It’s not a file from the DA’s office, like she’d thought it would be. Instead, it’s a case report from one of Jen’s contacts at the Central Park Precinct. Truncated, she assumes, and civvie approved, but still.

Nineteen year old girl. Darcy folds the photo back out of the way. Bishop, Katherine Elinor. Report of assault filed two weeks ago against one Richard Goodman, twenty-two, son of Robbie Goodman, of the Goodman and Okamura Trading Group. Katherine Bishop looks like a fighter, Darcy thinks, and turns back to the photo. Two black eyes, a swollen nose, a split lip, and the girl still looks like she’s about to tear the world a new asshole.

Katherine Bishop and Richard Goodman. Both with money, both with means. So why is Jen throwing this at her? Darcy doesn’t have the reputation for a big-name case like this one. The only thing Darcy has a reputation for is hanging a used tampon in the shower—which, by the way, is both unsanitary and completely untrue, because it was her bitchy roommate that did it and then blamed her when people were grossed out by it. But whatever. What the hell is Katherine Bishop doing looking for a lawyer that isn’t on the payroll of Daddy dearest? For that matter, how did Jen manage to get her hands on this at all? It’s not something that ought to be crossing Jen’s desk at the DA, not for a long while yet anyway. It doesn’t look like the investigation has even been closed.

 _I hate you_ , she texts Jen. Jen sends her a smiling Hulk emoji.

She’s there hours early, and she uses it. Darcy goes over what few case notes there are for this, and then googles Rich Goodman’s name, Katherine Bishop’s. Goodman’s going to NYU, Bishop to Barnard College.  No previous incidents, not in papers, anyway. Gossip sites talk about Katherine Bishop (‘Kate,’ the rag-mags call her) way more than they do Rich Goodman. Usually, it’s in association with her clothing, or her partying. She seems to party a lot. She also, Darcy notes, won a national archery competition two years ago. Very prestigious, when she looks up the name of the award. Who knew.

Mom dead, she writes. Dad busy. Possible involvement with drugs. (She doesn’t have a record, but who knows with rich kids?) She keeps coming back to the photo, though, the systemic deconstruction of Katherine Bishop’s face, the fury in her eyes. It’s not a mug shot. It’s an evidence photo.

 _She had the shit kicked out of her_.

“Are you Darcy Lewis?”

The voice is low, surprisingly husky. Katherine Bishop’s eyes have a Chinese or Japanese look to them, now that they’re not puffed up to the size of Michigan. Her short skirt looks like a prep school knockoff, and she’s wearing a Misfits’ band t-shirt that’s ripped in one shoulder. Her fingerless gloves are artfully tattered. She looks more like a goth table reject than the daughter of Elton Bishop, international trading mogul. Darcy’s pretty sure that the styling is on purpose. Darcy stands, and offers her hand. “Legally, genetically, and cosmically, much to my mother’s chagrin. You must be Miss Bishop.”

“Kate’s fine.” Her fingernails are painted black. “I don’t like my full name. It was my dad’s idea.”

“Okie-doke. I’m Darcy, then. And no, it’s not because of Jane Austen. Take a seat.”

Kate eases her way into the chair opposite, and stares at the Batman sticker on the back of Darcy’s laptop. Her nose still looks very broken, taped together at the bridge and swollen all the way down. Her lower lip is puffy and uncomfortable-looking, underneath her purple lipstick. Darcy sips at her cold coffee. “You want anything? Coffee, tea, sinfully delicious croissant?”

Kate shrugs. Darcy orders her a black coffee (she looks like that kind of girl) and a _pain au chocolat_ for the pair of them (she’s hungry), and then returns to the table to find Kate picking through the police file. It’s probably illegal. Darcy lets her. What the cops don’t know won’t hurt anyone, in this case.

“This is wrong,” says Kate finally, and tosses the file back onto the table. “Rich Goodman didn’t beat me up, he raped me. I didn’t attack him, he jumped me in Central Park with three of his buddies watching. And the report wasn’t filed by Detective D’Angelo, it was Officer Brigid O’Reilly, and she’s been transferred to a new precinct since then.”

“Jesus.” Darcy drops down hard into her chair. “You don’t pull punches, do you?”

Kate Bishop has one hell of a “cross me and I will rip your tongue out” face. Darcy swallows hard— _okay, new angle, come on, girl_ —and closes the file, tucking the papers back into it to give her hands something to do. “So you’re saying the police are actively covering it all up?”

“Less ‘active cover-up’ than ‘intentional misplacement,’ but yeah. Rich Goodman is an asshole and he likes to get his own way.”

There’s no way she can confirm that, not with what little information she’s managed to glean on Rich Goodman ( _God_ , that name drives her crazy) but there’s no way she can _disprove_ it, either, and that’s what matters. Besides, Kate is looking at her like she’s expecting Darcy’s going to call her crazy and walk away, and it reminds her way too much of Day By Day for her to turn her back on this. “Any way you can offer proof of that?”

Kate shrugs. “Officer O’Reilly, if they haven’t bought her off already. Other than that, not really. Aside from the three guys who watched him do it.”

Jesus. _Jesus_. Okay, then. “They didn’t do a rape kit at the station?”

“They did. They just threw it out as contaminated evidence. _Somehow_ it was mixed up with someone else’s samples and they came up negative.” The look on Kate’s face tells all. “I told you that Rich Goodman already knows how to get what he wants.”

Darcy looks down at the file. Then, deliberately, she puts it into her bag, shuts it, and opens her computer. The sound recorder’s already prepped and waiting. Kate looks from the screen to her and back again, and bites her lip.

“I want you to tell me what happened,” says Darcy. “We don’t have to do it now, but I want to hear it in your own words.”

“I thought this was what the cops did,” says Kate, still looking at Darcy’s computer.

“Clearly, the cops have fucked up.” Kate’s eyes widen, and snap to Darcy. Her kohl is smeared, “It’s not the first time I’ve found cops or cases that have let things slide or intentionally fudged the facts, especially in rape.” Kate doesn’t flinch at the word. She just stares. “I want to be able to help you, Kate, but in order for me to do that I need to know where to start. If you want to hire me, we need to be able to trust each other. We don’t have to stay here if you don’t want, don’t have to do this at all if you don’t want to, but it _will_ help, especially once I get a hold of the people who can help prove that it’s true.”

“Rich Goodman and his friends won’t talk to you.”

“No, but I’m pretty sure Brigid O’Reilly will. And if that fails, I know a really aggressive sergeant down at the 15th that’ll bully her into it for me.”

Kate looks back at the computer. The background rotates to an image of the Flash (Barry Allen, not Wally West), staring off into the distance with speed lines trailing from his back. Darcy waits.

“You’ve never been in court before,” says Kate after a long moment. “I looked you up when that Walters woman mentioned she’d be telling you about me. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I worked as a legal consultant for cases like this for a year and a half at the end of law school,” says Darcy. “And I’m starting off clean. I don’t take bribes, I don’t like bullies, and I’m fresh enough not to be bitter. I haven’t been steeped too long yet."

Kate’s lips twitch. She ducks her head, and her hair—it has streaks of purple in it, like Darcy’s has streaks of gold—falls forward to hide her face.

“We’re a very new firm, Kate, but we know what we’re doing, and we don’t scare easy.” Kate shreds some of her croissant, and then looks down in surprise when chocolate smears between her fingers. “I can’t promise you perfect results, because that’s impossible, but I can tell you I’ll do my absolute damndest to help you. I don’t know if that’s enough, but it’s all I have.”

“You talk a good game.”

“That’s a nice way of saying I’m a longwinded asshat.” Kate ducks her head again. “Kate. Will you tell me what happened?”

Kate looks around the coffee shop. It’s just loud enough that nobody who isn’t paying attention to them will hear what she’s saying. Still, she gets to her feet, and nods. “Come on,” she says. “I know somewhere we can go.”

The ‘somewhere’ is an all-ages karaoke joint three blocks from Mug Shots, one with private rooms. Kate puts down enough money for three hours, and then leads the way towards the back in a way that would have made it obvious that she comes here a lot, even if the receptionist hadn’t greeted her by name and asked after her nose. The place is a bit sketchy, but it’s clean, and nobody’s giving them the stink-eye, so Darcy judges it to be pretty safe. Kate still locks the door behind them, and settles down on one of the worn couches. Darcy sets the computer up on the table in the middle of the room, ignoring the mics set up and waiting beside it. She hits the record button. “My name is Darcy Lewis. It’s two-thirty pm on the—it’s the fifteenth, isn’t it? On the fifteenth of September. I’m with Katherine Elinor Bishop, hereafter known as Kate.” She folds her knees up under her. “Kate, if you’d start at the beginning, please.”

Kate licks her lips. Her lipstick has smeared on her teeth, little streaks of purple against the white. “What’s the beginning?”

Darcy thinks for a minute. “How about when you first met Rich Goodman?”

Kate picks at the fraying hem of her tights. “My dad and his kind of run together a little bit, with their jobs and stuff. So I, um, met him once or twice before this month. I never really talked to him, though. I was never old enough for him to be interested in me, and I always thought he was an asshole, so I didn’t really want to spend time with him. Um. He has a reputation at my high school. He used to go there. He sold a lot of drugs, so he was popular. Girls would write notes about him in the locker room, or in the bathrooms. Said not to be alone with him if you could help it.”

“Why?”

“There was a girl, Rebecca. She was a senior when I was a sophomore.” Kate bites her lip. “She said he raped her, but he said it was consensual. She. Um. She killed herself. She was pregnant with his kid.”

 _Rich Goodman._ Darcy wants to snort at the name. “What happened last week?”

“I ran into him at a club.” Kate darts a look at her, and then stares down at her knees again. “Jesus. That sounds terrible. I mean, it was an all-ages club, you needed ID to get drinks. A friend of mine had brought me a cocktail but I wasn’t, like, trashed or anything. My dad started me on alcohol when I was thirteen or so, ‘cause he’s French and he thinks that it’s, y’know, a good idea for us to build a tolerance. I’d only had a few sips of it, and I’d been keeping an eye on it, so I know it wasn’t spiked. I was, um, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, not really club stuff, but Daily Daze is kind of really chill. It’s not a place to put out or shut up, you know?”

“I’ve been there,” says Darcy. “I know.”  

“I ran into Rich towards the back. He was dealing, I think. The guys he was with went really quiet when they saw me, anyway, and hid some stuff in their pockets. I was looking for a friend of mine, I think she was one of his buyers. He—um. He hit on me, him and his buddies. I told them to fuck off.”

She stops. “I had a fight with my friend Callie later,” Kate says, her voice much less steady now. “About the drugs. We were—we were all walking through Central Park, maybe three in the morning. I hadn’t seen anybody, and I—I have a taser, so I thought I would be okay dropping back for a little while. They—they were following us. One of them grabbed me, and—um.”

She’s shaking. Darcy keeps her hands in her lap. There are people who telegraph a need for touch, for comfort, and Kate Bishop isn’t one of them. “Take as long as you need, Kate.”

Kate swallows, twisting her skirt between her hands. Then she swallows again. “One of his friends held my arms,” she says. “He—um. Yeah. There were pictures of the bruises. I don’t know if—if they’re still in the file or not.”

“They’re not.” Darcy drums her fingers on her knees. “I’ll see if I can find them.”

Kate lifts her head in a jerky sort of nod. She closes her eyes. “They were laughing at me,” she says, and it’s a broken sort of whisper that makes it obvious why Jen called her _fragile_. “They were—they called me a tranny whore. He raped me and they laughed while he was doing it.”

“Tranny?”

“I’m trans,” Kate snaps, her eyes dark. “Did they not mention that bit, in their file? I didn’t think they’d pass up the chance to use it against me. The booking officer sure liked to try.”

Darcy flexes her wrists. “Did they harass you?”

“Not in so many words, but there’s a look some people get.” Kate shrugs. “I transitioned in my first year of high school. Had my surgeries two years ago. Some people still remember reading about it, when the newspapers went nuts. I don’t know. They didn’t say anything, they just—one of the officers had this look on his face. You know, like—well. That look, I guess. That’s all I meant.”

Darcy’s phone buzzes, and they both jump. It’s a text from Karen. _Bring back paper? The printer just ate my last piece._ She swypes an okay, and then turns her phone off. Kate watches her put it into her bag. “Sorry.” Darcy prods her messenger bag under the table between them with her foot. “Did Goodman know?”

“Are you kidding? Of course he knew. Half the world knows.” Kate wrings her hands in her lap. “I’m not ashamed of it. I am who I am. People think they can give me shit for it, and I don’t let them. That’s why people don’t like me.”

“That and your winning personality.”

Kate bares her teeth at her in a wolfy smile. “There’s that too.”

“Did Goodman try to give you shit that night?”

“Not in the club.” She goes right back to twisting her hands, over and under, digging her nails into the skin over her knuckles. “In—um. In the park, he called me some stuff.”

“You don’t have to talk about it right now.”

“I want to.” Kate draws a breath, and it pours out. It’s not the first time Darcy’s heard the intimate details of a rape, not the first time she’s listened to a woman, or a man, or a child, talk about an assault. She hopes that there’ll never be a day when the stories don’t make her stomach churn, when the bruises don’t make her furious. She lives, she thinks, in the back of her head, in a state of constant fury, and she’s not sure anyone in the world will understand it.

Kate doesn’t cry. Her eyes shine, and tears escape, but she brushes them back and keeps talking. Darcy wonders if it’s the first time she’s actually had a chance to tell all of it, every awful word of it. Somehow she doesn’t think so. In another world, she might never have told anyone at all.

Something about that breaks Darcy’s heart, even though she knows it would be Kate’s choice. Something about that stings deep inside. She lets it.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about it,” Kate says. “I—I’m pretty active in certain online communities. I know, here—” she touches her temple “—that it’s not my fault it happened, and for the most part I know it here, too—” her fingers skip down to her heart “—but what was—what’s really hard is trying to understand _why_. I’ve been wondering, and I think—I think I have an answer for it, maybe. I think they did it because they thought I’d let them get away with it. Because they think that—they know my dad thinks I’m an embarrassment and wants to hush it up. Because they think that because I’m quiet, because I’m trans and everyone _knows_ I’m trans, that they can get away with saying I wanted it, or I asked for it, or—or they misunderstood. They think that they can make me a victim. And they’re _fucking wrong._ ”  

Kate glares at her. Darcy glares back, and slowly, deliberately, turns off the recording on the computer. “I need you to give me all their names,” says Darcy. “The friends you were out with, the officers you remember, Rich Goodman, anyone you recognized in the club. I want your father’s number, Robbie Goodman’s number, any number you think will help me. And then I want you to steel yourself, because when this hits the media, there’s going to be a shitstorm, and it’s not going to be pretty.”

Kate rakes her hair back from her face. She ties it back with a surprisingly childish band, one with two glittering purple balls attached to the elastic. There are bruises on her neck, too, yellowed, but clearly in the shape of fingerprints. She pulls out her phone.

“I’m not looking for pretty,” she says. “I’m looking to nail Rich Goodman’s balls to the wall.”

Darcy nods. “Let’s build a plan of attack.”

.

.

.

“Well, all I can say is that your case sounds infinitely preferable to Foggy’s and Matt’s.” Karen settles herself on the edge of the couch, careful not to spill her tea, and Darla bounds up after her, mewing. Darcy glares at her (the demon vampire cat, not Karen) and flips the TV to something slightly more palatable than the BBC News. “The guy that came in was seriously unsettling. _Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c’est_ level of unsettling.”

“Rich Goodman’s getting there.” She flops to the side, lying flat on her back, and props her laptop up on her thighs. Darcy tilts her head so she can peek up at Karen. “So? Work? Good?”

Karen blows out a breath. Her bangs stir against her cheek. “Weird,” she says finally. “I was googling a lot of legal terms. Also the coffee machine is satanic, so I just brought my press from—from home.”

“You went home alone?” Darcy frowns. “You didn’t have to do that. You could have dragged Matt out.”

“Matt fell down his stairs yesterday, he said. He looked terrible and I didn’t want to bother Foggy. Plus, you know.” Karen shrugs. “I’m starting to understand that those two only have two settings, and they’re snark and legal obsession.”

“That sounds about right.” Darcy pulls up Tumblr and starts to scroll. “I’m sorry you had to go alone.”

“It’s okay. I needed to at some point. I feel like if I put it off it’ll just get worse and worse in my head, and then I’d never be able to go back at all.” Karen curls her toes into the edge of the couch. “Can I have the remote?”

“Go for it, cheese.”

Karen plucks it off of Darcy’s collarbone, and flips the channels until she finds a Hitchcock marathon. It’s not necessarily what Darcy would have chosen, if she’d been the one to almost be murdered within the past thirty-six hours, but whatever, people cope in different ways. Besides, _Psycho_ may or may not be one of her primary comfort movies. (She never said she wasn’t fucked up.)

“I never said thank you.” Karen doesn’t take her eyes off the screen as Norman Bates raises his knife, a gleam of silver in the black-and-white. “For coming out with us last night. It was seriously exactly what I needed, y’know? To feel sort of normal again.”

“Getting royally wasted will help with that, always.” Darcy rolls over on her side, resting her computer on the coffee table, and then heaves Darla the cat up onto her lap. Darla mowls, but accedes to the attention for once. “And there’s seriously no better person to get trashed with than Foggy, I swear to god. He’s like…the ultimate wingman. It’s awesome.”

”You guys are all really close.” She smiles a bit. “But—I dunno. You’re close but you’re not insular, I guess. I didn’t feel left out.”

“Hell no you weren’t. We welcome all freaks and geeks to our numbers.” Darcy leans her head back to look at Karen again. “Besides, I’ve been feeling kind of surrounded by testosterone, so it’s nice that you’re here now. I don’t have to bully them into doing things for me anymore.”

“Like what?”

“I say this as someone who usually loathes the term ‘girly’ because of all the awful sexist connotations therein, but despite how well I’ve trained them to acknowledge that activities should not have overtly masculine or feminine perceptions attached, I still can’t get Foggy to get a manicure with me.”

Karen snorts tea up her nose. It’s only once she’s caught her breath, and Darla has driven all her little demon claws into Darcy’s boobs in an effort to get away from the choking hacking thing at the end of the couch, that she says, “I would pay to see that.”

“He’d be awesome, right? Jen won’t go with me either. She thinks it’s facile.” Darcy frowns. “I can usually do Matt, though. Like…he won’t go to a salon with me, but he rocks nail polish. I haven’t trapped him into it lately, I should do that.”

Thankfully, Karen’s not swallowing tea this time. She still hacks a little bit.

“You okay there, bro?”

“Fine.” Her voice warbles. “I usually can’t afford manicures or anything, but when you guys start paying me we can do that, maybe.”

“I thought we weren’t paying you?”

“I do have bills.”

“No, I know. I’m teasing.” Darcy rolls over onto her stomach. “I just didn’t know we had enough money _to_ pay you, I guess.”

“Snake-in-a-suit’s check went through depressingly quickly. And—I dunno. I might be coming into some money soon.” Karen darts a look at her, and then stares down into her tea. “Union Allied offered me a check to never talk about it again.”

“Talk about it?”

“What happened with Danny.”

Jesus. It’s like the universe can’t seem to stop dumping on them. “Are you going to take it?”

“I don’t know.” Karen swirls her tea in the mug. In her sheep pajamas, she looks very young and vulnerable. “I don’t think it’d be right, to do it. But I don’t see what else I can do. I think—I think I want to keep fighting it, though. I just don’t know how I’d do it.”

“How much are they offering you?”

Karen tells her. Darcy can feel her heart seizing up in her chest at the number of zeroes attached. It’s not the biggest payoff she’s ever heard of, especially not for scandals like this one, but it’s definitely more money than _she’s_ ever had in her bank account. Collectively. Over the course of her entire life. “Holy shit, Karen.”

“They’re trying to buy me off.” Karen clenches her fingers around her mug. “I don’t want to let them do it, but I don’t see what else I can do. I just—I don’t know.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to tell them to fuck off,” Karen bites out. “I want them to act like they actually did something wrong. I want whoever killed Danny to pay. He died because of me. I don’t want to forget that.”

“And you shouldn’t.” Darcy scoots up, and sets her head on Karen’s knee. Karen flinches, and then relaxes, slowly, like she’s a startled cat. Then she drops a hand to Darcy’s shoulder, squeezing a little. Darcy huffs. “It’s not something that you should ever have to forget.”

Karen watches _Psycho_ with glassy eyes for a minute. “What do you think I should do?”

“Do you want the money?”

“I could _use_ the money.” Karen shuffles. “I don’t _want_ the money. It’s like…I don’t know.”

“Like you’re giving in.”

“Yeah.”

“Then tell them no.”

Karen hums, and doesn’t say anything more. Darcy closes her eyes. “You should pet my hair.”

Karen snorts. But she pets her hair.

.

.

.

Two days later, Darcy leaves the office alone. It’s about nine o’clock; Matt’s already gone off home a long time ago, trying his very best not to limp even though she _knows_ he’s fucked up his leg somehow falling down the stairs like he did. Karen is still working on building their financial programs (bless ladies with degrees in computer science) and Foggy’s probably asleep on his desk trying to deal with this snake in a skin suit that they’ve signed on with. There’s not much left she can do here, though, so Darcy shoves her phone into her pocket and hooks her earbuds into her ears, tucking her sunglasses into the inside pocket of her coat.

She’s just turned down the street towards the apartment when she sees the guy following her. Not a homeless man. A hipster, probably. Wavy hair. Skinny jeans. He's out late, whoever he is. He has a fluro vest on it that reads _The Nature Conservancy_ on it in sharp lettering. She steps into the light of the nearest lamp to let him pass, and pass he does. Slowly, and with a lot of staring, but he passes, and Darcy stares back at him, wondering what the hell is on her face to get him so jumpy. He stops two feet from her, and then turns back to face her, his hands stiff in his pockets.

"I can't donate what I don't have, dude,” she says. “Sorry.”

The guy's mouth twists. Then he lunges forward, and shoves her hard. Darcy shrieks, and stumbles back, because he’s pushed her into an alleyway, and the lights here are dim and uncomfortable. The guy shoves her again, further back into the alley, and she trips over a glass bottle, barely catching herself before she ends up on her ass. “Jesus!”

“Sorry,” says the dude, and then looks over her shoulder. “When do I get paid?”

“Money’s waiting in your backpack,” says a voice, and Darcy’s heart jams into overtime. She can feel her skin prickling. A dark figure slips away from the wall of the alley, all leather jacket and grim eyes, and she can’t help it. She whimpers a little. “Thanks for your help.”

That’s what he starts to say, anyway. Before he can finish it, Darcy whips her purse around, slamming it hard into the guy’s face. He hits the wall with a curse and a bloody nose. Red spatters against her wrist. Arms from nowhere cinch tight around her ribs, pinning her arms to her sides. She hears a crunch as her bag hits the ground. Darcy shrieks. She kicks out with both feet, and catches a kneecap with the heel of her shoe. Someone howls in her ear. Her heart is exploding. She screams again, and then a hand— _cigarette smoke and blisters, the smell of motor oil—_ presses down hard over her mouth, jamming her lips into her teeth. She snaps, and catches skin. She tastes blood. The guy holding her swears in her ear. “ _Fucking bitch—_ ”

“—hold her still—”

“—be _quiet_ , you fucking—”

Darcy arches her back and slams her hips into the guy’s pelvis. She feels something soft against her back. He grunts, loudly, and his arms loosen. She rams her elbow into his ribs, lashes out with her fingernails. Something hot and sticky bursts against her palm. The guy screams. She turns— _run_ , her mind shrieks at her, _run, run, run_ —and then there’s a hand in her hair, twisting tight.

There’s a knife against her throat.

“Stay still,” says a voice in her ear, hissing, “or I’ll kill you, I swear to fucking god.”

Darcy stays still. There’s blood under her fingernails. Her ear is throbbing, for some reason. The back of her head aches, stings. The man in a leather jacket and scars over his ear wipes red off his cheek. She’s gouged him, she realizes. _Fuck you_ , she thinks at him. Her stomach clenches. Her eyes burn. _Fuck you. Fuck you_.

“The case with Kate Bishop.” The hand holding the knife clenches tight. She can feel his fingers shifting against her throat. “Drop it.”

She swallows. The blade bobs over her windpipe, cold, cold, cold. Her brain is skipping between thoughts like a bad record ( _how did they—when—why—I can’t—kill me—_ ) but there’s one thing that stands out, playing back clean and clear. _Rich Goodman always gets his way,_ Kate had said. How the hell they’d learned of this so fast? Who knows. Maybe they’re tracking her.

Darcy swallows hard. “Y’know,” she says. Her voice cracks. “Where I come from we ask _nice_ when we want people to do things for us.”

She hears the tear before she feels the sting. The man behind her drops his knife to her arm, and digs in. Darcy screams, but he’s already covered her mouth with his other hand. The scarred man watches, eyes dark in the alley light, as the man with the knife raises his blade three inches and then cuts her again, three sharp slices over her forearm. It _burns_. Tears roast her cheeks. _Oh god oh god oh god._ The man lifts the bloody knife to her throat again. “Do you think we’re screwing around? Do you think we’re _fucking_ playing with you?”

Darcy bites her tongue until she tastes blood on her lip. Her knees are trembling. She should be scared, she thinks. She _is_ scared. The scream is building in her throat like a pimple. But her hands are shaking and her heart is snapping and crackling and _burning_. She’s angry. They’ve used a knife on her, threatened her, and she’s fucking _furious_.

“I don’t know,” she says. “You don’t seem like the sort of guy to put out on the first date.”

The man with the scars backhands her. Darcy feels her teeth cut into her lip; the piercing in her tongue slams into the roof of her mouth. She swallows blood, and spits more out. Then the man with the scars hits her again, and the fire turns into a meteor, hurtling around her insides.

“Don’t fuck with me, Darcy Lewis.” She goes very still. Behind her, the man with the knife hooks his arm tighter around her waist. “Partner in Nelson, Murdock and Lewis. One of them, he’s blind, isn’t he? Think how easy it’ll be for me to hurt him. Just step up behind him on a street corner and—”

He shoves her hard against the wall. Stars burst in front of her eyes. Before she can do something, grab a rock, scream, he whips her around and puts his knife to her throat again. She can see his face now, she thinks. He’s very blonde, his eyelashes and eyebrows so fair they seem almost invisible. He sounds like he’s from Jersey. “The other one, well. Mugging gone wrong, don’t you think? I saw him putting a dollar in a can the other day. People would believe it. And then the Page woman, Jen Walters—well, they’re the easiest of all.”

Her heart’s in her mouth, a ten-ton weight. Her sleeve is soaked. Her eyes burn. She squeezes them shut. “Leave them out of this,” she says, and her voice comes out funny and slurred, like she’s drunk. “You leave them alone, you son of a fucking bitch.”

“Can’t do that, darlin’.” Her Atlanta accent coming out of his mouth is like a slap. She tastes bile. “You have a choice here. Walk away, or watch them die. One by one, slowly, where you’ll be sure to see it happen. And then when they’re gone, we’ll find you, and you’ll wish we started with you first.”

“Wow,” she says. “This is like a shitty B-movie. Did you write those lines yourself?”

He shoves her against the wall again. And then again. Her ears ring. Then he lifts his knife-free hand, and whips his fist across her mouth. She hits the ground with a crack, her eyes crossing, and she thinks: _No_. Jen. Matt. Foggy. Karen. _No_.

“You gonna be smart?” asks the blonde man. Darcy can’t speak. He kicks her in the stomach, and it’s like a lightning-strike—still and silent for a moment, and then an explosion of agony all through her guts, fire and fury in one. “You gonna do the right thing, Darcy Lewis?”

She wants to kill him. She wants to drive her thumbs into his eyes until she feels them burst. She wants to take his stupid knife and cut him with it, over and over and over. She wants to scream.

Behind the blonde man, something flickers.

“Fuck you,” says Darcy, and curls into a ball. She hears something snap and crunch, and the blonde man lets out a shriek. Something clatters against the floor of the alley. It’s the knife, still slick with blood. Darcy grabs it, and scoots away, pressing her back against the wall and folding both hands around the hilt as the man with the scars smashes into a fire escape and drops to the ground. The new man—a man dressed all in black, a man with a ski-mask and gloves and broad shoulders in the dark—ducks low and sweeps the blonde man’s feet out from under him, and Darcy yanks her feet away before he can get a grip on them. The man in black crouches down over him, and hits him once, hard in the face.

 _Mask_ , she thinks, looking at him. Then, when the man with scars gets to his feet, gripping an iron pipe: _devil._ It’s like the masked man has eyes in the back of his head. Before the man with scars can even finish his strike, he’s spinning out of the way, gripping the man’s wrist and snapping it sideways. There’s a wet crack. The man with scars screams, and the iron pipe hits the ground. The masked man kicks it up, catches it, and slams it across the man’s scarred cheek the same way you would a baseball bat. Something spatters against the ground. The scarred man drops and doesn’t get up again, and the masked man, the devil, he twirls the iron pipe twice in his hand before ramming it down against the blonde man’s back.

Darcy stares.

The blonde man is fumbling for something in his belt. For a single, insane moment, Darcy wonders if he’s trying to drop trou. Then there’s the grey gleam of a gun, and she shrieks when it goes off. The sound ricochets against her ears. The masked man snaps to the side, and kicks the gun out of the man’s hand. It skitters to Darcy’s feet, and she grabs that too. In the moment her eyes drop to the gun, the masked man hits the blonde again with the pipe. And then again, so that the blonde man is gagging against the ground. He rolls onto his side, trying to hide his guts, and the masked man hits him one more time, hard in the hip. Something cracks. _Pelvis_. Then the devil tosses the pipe aside, far out of reach. Darcy looks down at the gun, and turns the safety on with trembling fingers. There’s blood, dark and tacky, under her fingernails.

The masked man crouches down over the blonde, and seizes him by the hair, holding on. He clears his throat. “Who do you work for?” he says, and his voice is deep and husky, as if he’s trying to disguise it. _Well, of course he is. He doesn’t want anyone to find him._ She wonders if his mask is made of special fabric, how good his eyes are to see, to fight, through the fuzzy world of a ski-mask. Still, Karen’s right: it’s a nice voice. “Think very carefully before you answer. Wouldn’t want something to happen to your windpipe.”

She hears the blonde man swallow. There are soft hiccupping sounds from beneath the devil, as if he’s struggling to hold back sobs. Then he says: “Fuck you, asshole.”

The man in black knocks his head hard into the asphalt. There’s a crunching sound when the blonde man’s nose breaks. Then the devil rolls the man over, and punches him once in the face. The dark part of Darcy, the part that wants to drive her stolen knife into the man’s guts, purrs. “Wrong answer,” says the devil. “Try again.”

“Son of a _bitch—_ ”

She can’t see what the devil does, but there’s an ugly wet snap, and the blonde man screams. She looks at the scarred man, but he doesn’t even twitch. The devil leans forward, until he and the blonde are nearly nose to nose. “I,” he says, “have had a _really shitty_ few days. Next smartass answer will get you a broken neck.”

“You don’t kill people,” says the blonde, but his voice cracks.

“Not if I can help it. I’ll still break your neck. Best case scenario, you’ll learn to walk again. Maybe. Worst case? You’ll live in a hospital bed for the rest of your life. People will have to help you shit.” The devil straightens, crouching on the balls of his feet. “Or you can tell me what I need to know. Your choice.”

There’s an audible silence. Darcy holds her breath. She thinks the sound of her heartbeat might wreck something, this delicate skein of peace over violence. Then the blonde man licks his lips. “Robbie Goodman,” he says. “Robbie Goodman sent us.”

The devil doesn’t say anything. He just slams the blonde man’s head into the pavement, once, twice, again, until she can see blood shining against his cheeks. The blonde man goes still after the third strike, and for a nauseating second, she thinks he might be dead. Then she sees his chest raise and fall, and realizes that he’s just unconscious. His hair is wet. It’s only then that the devil rolls to his feet, and kicks the iron pole out of his way, setting a hand gingerly to his side as if to cover some hidden injury. He doesn’t look at her. He turns to go.

“Wait,” says Darcy, and the devil of Hell’s Kitchen stops in his tracks. It takes a long time for her to feel like she can stand without throwing up, but stand she does. The gun and knife dangle from her fingers. She can hear her blood dripping to the concrete. “Are you going to go after him?” she asks. “Goodman.”

The devil turns his face away from her. She hears him lick his lips. “He seems like he could use a visit.”

Him and his rat bastard son. Him and all his cronies. Him and his _fucking_ mother. “Let me do it,” Darcy says.

The devil turns to her then. She can barely make out the shape of his face, the edge of his jaw wreathed in shadow. “What?”

“I want to do it.” She drops the gun to the ground, and then covers the cuts on her arm. They’re throbbing with the beat of her heart, pumping her blood into the world. “I want this bastard to suffer. I want him to _suffer_ for what he did. But I want to do it my way.”

The devil crosses his arms over his chest, and waits.

“His son raped my client.” She swallows. Her hands are trembling. She’s going to cry, but she won’t do it yet. She _won’t_. “His thugs attacked me. They threatened my friends, people that matter to me. I want him gone. But I want him scared of me. I want him to be as frightened of me as he would be of you, and if I’m going to get that, then we’re going to have to do it my way.”

She thinks she might be imagining the smile she sees flickering around his mouth. When a car passes the head of the alley, its headlights shining into this stupid hole, it’s gone again. “You’re nobody,” says the devil. “And he’s not.”

“That’s why I need your help.” Darcy folds her arm close into herself, not caring if she stains anything. “Will you?”

The devil is silent and still for a long moment. Then he takes two steps back, and leaps. Darcy stumbles into the wall, dropping the knife, but he’s just heaving himself up onto the fire escape with about as much effort as it would take for her to lift a kitten. It’s only once he’s crouched two storeys above her head, his hands hooked around the bars, that he looks back down at her and says, “I’ll be in touch.”

Then he’s gone, leaping from fire escape to balcony to rooftop. His footsteps fade. Darcy is hyper-aware of the smell of the street, of blood dripping from her wrist and elbow. Of the way she aches in a million places, and how the blonde man and the scarred one are still lying flat on the ground of the alleyway, broken and bruised but still breathing. She looks at the bodies left behind, and then limps to her purse. It’s only once she’s dialed 911, and she hears the sirens, red and blue flashing against the walls of the alley, that she texts Kate. Her fingers leave smears on the screen.

_Let’s nail these bastards to the wall._


	4. Confessions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for: aftermath of an assault, hospital stuff, mentions of rape, discussions of past assault, and descriptions of healing injuries (broken bones, scabs, bruises, etc).

They have her settled in a bed at the ICU and Darcy’s waiting for the okay to check out—they took a few scans of her head, just to make sure she doesn’t have any brain damage from her newfound acquaintance with New York pavements—when she hears the door open at the end of the ward, and Foggy’s familiar quickstep against the tile floors. Her whole body aches—her ribs, which are already a spectacular purple, her neck where the knife gashed her once or twice, but most especially her arm, even with the topical anesthetic they’d stuck her with to get the stitches done—so when Foggy shows up at the end of her bed she holds up both hands. “No glomping. I hurt.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Darcy.” He’s glue-white and nearly shaking, pupils blown wide. “What the hell happened to you? Brett said someone mugged you—”

“Not exactly.” She heaves herself up against the bed, trying to sit up, and next to her the nurse makes an irritated clucking noise. “Look, lady, either get me to lay down or help me prop up with pillows or something, because my ribs aren’t broken and I’m about ninety percent sure my head’s okay.”

“Far be it from me to give medical advice,” says the nurse, but she helps Darcy sit up anyway, and then stalks off. Probably to complain to the doctor about her. Foggy drops down onto the edge of her bed, and it’s then that Darcy realizes Karen came too. Her lips are pressed paper thin, and her knuckles are white from how hard she’s clutching the straps of her purse. Darcy pats Foggy’s hand vaguely.

“I’m okay,” she says. She lisps through her swollen lip. “Seriously. They just want me to stay for a few more hours for observation and then I can go.”

“ _Jesus._ ” Just outside the door, a passing nun makes an extraordinarily unhappy noise. “Sorry,” says Foggy. “But Jesus, Darcy, I never want to get a call like that one again. Do you have any idea how terrifying it is for Brett to call you in the middle of the night to tell you that one of your partners had the shit kicked out of her?”

“Aww, Brett called you himself?” She makes herself smile. “Did he say nice things about me?”

“Can you be serious for once in your life, please?” Foggy watches one of the nurses go by the window. Karen settles on Darcy’s other side, still terrifyingly silent, but when Darcy reaches out with her good hand, Karen takes it and squeezes hard. Her cuticles are bloody. (Karen has a habit of biting her nails when she’s stressed.) Darcy holds on. “What the hell happened?”

“Some guys—um.” She wants pain meds. Why haven’t they given her the good meds yet? Oh, yeah. Because she can’t afford it. _Fuck you, health insurance._ “They wanted me to drop the Bishop case.”

Foggy closes his eyes for a long moment. “This is because of a _case_?”

“That’s what I assume, considering they kept saying _drop the case, drop the case._ Unless they were saying _drop the bass,_ but—”

“Are you shitting me right now?” Foggy’s hands flutter, as if he wants to hug her, but also like he thinks she’s going to shatter into pieces if he tries it. Karen scoots higher up on the bed, and leans hard into Darcy’s shoulder. Her hair smells like a vanilla latte. “Jesus Christ. Jesus _Christ._ ”

Her eyes burn. Darcy blinks furiously, and lifts her arms. Foggy leans over and pulls her close as he can without bruising her more, and it’s nice. He smells like bagels and printer ink and shampoo, like Foggy, and for the first time since her one and only panic attack in the back of Brett’s cop car, Darcy hiccups. She squeezes her eyes shut, and ignores the way her ribs are pounding. One of them’s fractured, according to the hot doctor who’d done her X-rays; she’s not telling Foggy that. Not yet, anyway. Karen, though—Karen looks like she’s about ready to start going through Darcy’s charts. _Curse your efficiency, Page._

“I’m okay.” Her voice cracks. “Seriously. I’ll be okay. They could have done way worse, but they didn’t. Brett already took my statement. I’ll testify against them. They’ll go away, and—and I’ll get better, and then everything will be okay.”

“Somehow it’s really weird for you to be the one comforting me, considering you’re the one in the hospital bed.” Foggy pets her hair for a moment. “You’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re sure?”

“As sure as I can be.”

“Want me to represent you?” he says, very seriously, and Darcy smiles into the collar of his shirt.

“I doubt the judge would let you, but—that’d be nice.”

“I’ll charge you later.”

She chokes on a laugh, and pulls back. Karen kicks off her shoes and curls up on the bed next to Darcy, knocking their shoulders together. Karen Page, Darcy’s discovered, is a secret cuddle addict. She can feel the way Foggy’s watching them, and makes a mental note to mock him for jealousy when she doesn’t feel like a piece of roadkill. “Where’s Jen?”

“On her way. She couldn’t find a taxi at first, had to walk some of it.” Foggy cracks his knuckles nervously, looking down at her hands again. “Oh my god, what happened to your arm?”

“He cut me.” Her voice rasps. “What about Matt?”

“He _cut you_?” She’s never heard Foggy sound quite like that before. “What do you mean, he _cut_ you?”

“I mean he cut me. With a knife. Which is generally how people cut other people.”

Foggy goes stock still for a long, terrifying moment. Then he says, “What room are they in?”

“No.” She leans forward, wraps her arms around his waist. It’s more to keep him in place than anything. “Nope. No. I told you I’m okay. The cops have them. I’ll testify. I’ll kick their asses. Don’t even think about doing anything stupid.”

“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” says Foggy through gritted teeth. “I’m just going to go and punch them. In their faces.”

“That qualifies as stupid.”

“I’ll do it,” Karen says. “I’m good at punching things.”

“Guys, I love you for this, but if you get arrested because of me I will seriously kill you so bad you won’t be able to get up anymore.” Karen shifts, and Darcy seizes her hand without looking, lacing their fingers together to keep her in place. “Seriously, don’t.”

“Darcy, let go.” Foggy wriggles. Darcy clings tighter. “I need to punch them. Or possibly glare them into submission. Make threats—Jesus, Darcy, are you okay? They didn’t—”

He stops.

“If you’re trying to find a PC way to ask if I was raped then you don’t have to worry because I wasn’t.” He doesn’t seem like he’s going to charge off anymore, so Darcy eases back, until she’s just leaning on him more than keeping him still. “They just whacked me and cut me a few times. And then some guy beat the shit out of them and then left.”

Karen swallows. “The devil?”

“I dunno. I didn’t see. I was kind of staring at my own belly button.” She doesn’t want to lie to them, she really, really doesn’t, but she’s pretty sure they’ll be in more danger if she doesn’t. The fact that Robbie Goodman tried to use them against her is one thing. The idea of them learning about her deal with the devil ( _haha, Darce, very funny_ )—well, that’s entirely different. “Maybe. They were just—they were hitting me, and then they weren’t.”

Karen swallows. The bruises on her throat flicker in the bright fluros of the hospital room. Then she leans into Darcy a little, tipping her head to knock it against Darcy’s temple. Darcy leans back into it, and flinches when she goes to bite her lip and gets a scab instead. “Whoever it was, I’m glad you’re okay.”

Her smile feels shaky. Tears burn in her eyes. Darcy squeezes them shut, and leans back into Karen. “Does this mean you’ll make me banana bread?”

Karen laughs. “Sure. Banana bread at three am. Can do.”

“—my _sister_ , you asshole!” Someone bellows from the other end of the ward, and as one the three of them look through the window to see Jen Walters—in boxer shorts, a Columbia sweatshirt, and flip-flops—glaring at the nurse at the entrance to the ICU. Darcy’s never seen her so furious; there are bright red patches in her cheeks, and she’s clenching and unclenching her fists as if she’s dying to sink them into someone’s guts. Matt’s right behind her, his hands wrapped tightly around his cane like it's the only thing propping him up. Foggy squeezes Darcy’s hand once, and then gets up to go and meet them, jogging so that they don’t have another assault charge to add to their list. As soon as Jen sees him, all the fight goes out of her, and her eyes dart over Foggy’s shoulder to find Darcy in her hospital bed.

Darcy lifts a hand, and gives her a little wave. “Hey,” she says. “Since when am I your sister?”   

Before Darcy can really even blink, Jen’s bolted into Darcy’s room and engulfed her in warmth and hair and shaking hands. “Oh my g-god,” she says, and to her horror, Darcy realizes that Jen’s shoulders are trembling, as if she’s about to cry. “Oh my g-god, D-Darcy, I’m s-so, so s-sorry, I didn’t—I d-didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay.” Darcy doesn’t know what to do, so she pats Jen’s back. “It’s okay. It’s—I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”

“It is _n-not okay_ ,” says Jen, and pulls back. She grips Darcy’s shoulders. “You d-drop that c-case, Darcy Lewis. You _d-drop that c-case._ ”

“No,” says Darcy flatly, and covers Jen’s hands with her owns. “They made it personal, now. I’m not going to turn my back on Kate.”

“ _They tried to kill you_ ,” says Foggy in a high-pitched voice from the doorway. At the end of the bed, Matt flinches.

“They threatened me.”

“ _And cut you with a knife._ ”

Jen makes a noise like a deflating bicycle tire, and pulls away from Darcy as though she’s been burned. “Oh _god_.”

“That counts as a threat.” Darcy glances at Karen, who is still and silent and thoughtful, and then back at Foggy and Jen. “I’m not dropping the case, you guys. I’m not going to do it. Rich Goodman and his dad need to learn that they can’t just threaten people to get what they want. We bite back.”

Foggy lets out a string of swearwords that impresses even Darcy. He’s moved onto anatomically impossible suggestions and Chinese curses from _Firefly_ by the time Matt finds his way around to the edge of the bed that Foggy’s left behind, standing there as if he’s not quite sure what to do. Darcy squeezes Karen’s hand once, and then reaches out to take Matt’s cane. He jumps a little when their fingers touch, and then finds her shoulder, the back of her neck. “Hey,” he says, and Darcy leans forward to rest her head against his belly. Matt strokes her hair. “You okay?”

“I’m okay.”

She feels him huff. Matt bends down and sets his lips hard against the top of her head. “Like I said. You’re shit at lying.”

“Shut your mouth.” She takes his hand, and squeezes. She thinks he might be able to tell that she’s shaking, because he doesn’t let go, even when Darcy pulls away. “Foggy, seriously. I’m not dropping the case.”

“You are currently crazy, and, according to your doctor, might even be suffering from a TBI, so sorry, your opinion’s not valid at the moment.” Foggy frets with the sleeve of his coat. “We’ll call Kate Bishop in the morning, say there are extenuating circumstances—”

“Foggy, seriously, if you do that I will kill you.”

“Emulate your attackers! Yes, very positive career choices, Darcy—”

“And it’s more positive to just _let them win_?”

“You’re not _letting them win_ , you’re just—” But Foggy has no answer for that. He changes tack. “What if they attack you again and the next time they don’t just stop at knocking you around?”

“Then I’ll start carrying around a taser or something, I don’t know. Take self-defense classes. I’m not backing down on this, Foggy—”

“Darcy—”

“Jen, I love you, but I’m _not_. That girl needs help and I’m _not_ about to let some bully think he can push me around!”

“Tasers don’t work on _guns_ , Darcy! What if—”

“Foggy,” says Matt, and it cuts through Foggy’s diatribe like a razor blade. “It’s her choice.”

“It’s a _stupid choice_ ,” Foggy snaps, and next to him Jen nods. “They could _kill_ her if she keeps going—”

“They can’t kill me.” Darcy shakes her head. “It’s like Union Allied, with Karen. Too much press means they can’t touch me. If we splash this everywhere, then I’m invincible.”

“How can we—”

“She’s right.” Karen knocks her shoulder into Darcy’s. Darcy winces. “Sorry. Foggy, you know she’s right. The more she spreads this, the harder it’ll be for them to—for them to try.” She swallows hard, but the tigress is back in her eyes. “We’ll all just have to be really careful until then.”

“And how do you propose we tell people about this?” Foggy throws up his hands. “The _Bulletin_ only jumped on the Union Allied case because it was _Union Allied_ that was doing evil deeds. A lawyer getting beat up in a dark alley is a story ripped straight out of the eighties pages.”

“Hell’s Kitchen isn’t what it was in the eighties, but it’s not what it was before the incident, either.” Matt runs his thumb over Darcy’s knuckles. She’s pretty sure he’s not aware that he’s even doing it. It feels nice, though, so she doesn’t tell him to stop. “All the gentrification that was happening before the incident kind of went down the toilet when aliens came down out of the sky and blew up half of Midtown. It’s why people like Union Allied nearly managed to get away with their pension fund, because nobody asks around anymore. Because people are scared. It’s why the gangs are coming back. Who knows, the people at the _Bulletin_ might even appreciate the tip that people think it’s okay to beat up lawyers again.”

“Speaking of bullied lawyers—” Darcy tugs on his hand. “What the hell happened to you, anyway?”

Matt shakes his head. “I’m fine. You’re the one who had the shit kicked out of you.”

“You look like you walked into a bar and said ouch.”

“I fell down the stairs to the roof.”

“Oh my god.”

“We’re not talking about how much of a klutz Matt can be.” Foggy crosses his arms tight over his chest. “I just want to make it known that I have _very strenuous objections_ to any of us continuing to work on the Kate Bishop case.”

“Objections noted,” Darcy snaps. “Also, dismissed. Go buy me ice cream, my mouth hurts.”

Foggy’s never been able to win a glaring match. He throws his hands up in the air, and stalks off to the cafeteria to buy ice cream. Jen’s caught between tears and fury; her cheeks are pink, her eyes shining, and she twists her hands together as if she’s trying to tie her fingers into knots. Darcy pulls her hand out of Matt’s, and offers both of them to Jen. It takes a long moment before Jen finally sighs, and takes them.

“I’ve thought about this, Jenny.” Jen scoffs. Darcy squeezes her fingers tight. “I need to do this. Not just for Kate, but for me. I’m not going to let them win. I’m done running away from bullies. All I need is for you to trust me. Okay?”

Jen searches her face. Then she closes her eyes, and nods once. Darcy leans forward and wraps her arms tight around Jen’s waist, hiding her face in the soft fabric of Jen’s sweatshirt. Jen hugs her back, stroking Darcy’s hair back out of her face. “Okay,” she says, in nearly a whisper. “Okay.”  

Matt reaches out, and brushes his fingers against the small of her back.

.

.

.

It’s another six hours before the hospital decides that her MRIs have come back clear, and she’s allowed to go home. Matt and Foggy have one more day before the trial opens for Senor Shark, so after they’ve made sure she’s settled safely into her and Jen’s apartment (Karen ensconced firmly next to her bed with Darla in her lap, Netflix queue at the ready) they head off to do deeds of derring-do on the behalf of the New York legal system. Karen falls asleep halfway through _Stardust_ , Darla still perched on her knee. Darcy grabs her phone (holding the banana bell in one fist to keep it from ringing) and then texts Kate ( _coffee Friday, 9am?)_ before closing Netflix down and bringing up Google.

Wikipedia mostly has nice things to say about Robbie Goodman. The profile picture on his official Facebook page is more flattering than most of the paparazzi shots that she can find on Google Images—it shows less of his double-chin, and his hair’s combed over to hide the bald spot—but mostly he just looks like Rush Limbaugh. His son, Richard, must take after his mother. He’s dark where Robbie’s fair, skin pale where Robbie’s blotchy. The eyes are the same, though, a sort of limpid blue that makes her think of bad watercolors.

 _Kathy Waters_ , Kate had said. Kathy’s Facebook page puts her somewhere in the Philippines, out of range of whatever legal trouble Darcy could get her into. She marks Kathy off as a _no._ Rebecca Marquez is dead, but her parents are still alive. She won’t be able to use them as witnesses, not for Kate’s trial, but if they come forward as character witnesses…maybe. She puts a star next to their names in her notebook, and keeps going. Tiahna Marco’s in Jersey, and her page is public. Then there’s Lizbeth Pereggia, still in the city. Chloe Commons is going to college in Albuquerque, but who knows. Out of all of these names, the only one Kate knows for sure had been victimized by Rich Goodman is Rebecca Marquez, but Darcy can reach out to them anyway. Maybe they can pull a Bill Cosby, and hit the Goodmans with a million suits at once.

Karen snaps awake at about three o’clock, kisses her forehead, and then dashes off to meet up with someone she won’t name. Darcy lets her go—it’ll be easier to work without Karen hanging over her shoulder, anyway—and then calls Brett at the 15th. According to his records, Brigid O’Reilly had been shifted from the Central Park precinct to the 34th, about as far away as they can get her from Midtown and the Park without removing her from Manhattan altogether. Darcy leaves a message with the sergeant at the 34th, ignoring the scathing “thanks, sweetcheeks,” from his end, and then starts going through the backlog of sample legal cases from Day By Day for help. PACER helps, too, but by the time she starts going thorugh the third case her eyes are crossing, and she can’t keep track of anything anymore.

She must doze for a while, because she wakes up when the front door shuts. It’s Jen. She knocks twice before poking her head into Darcy’s room, an envelope in one hand.

“Matt said this c-came for you at the office,” she says, and offers it to Darcy. There’s nothing but a _D_ on the front, in a hand she doesn’t know, and the back is unsealed. Darcy takes it, holding it in both hands. Jen settles on the end of Darcy’s bed. “How are y-you doing?”

“Okay.” Darcy shrugs. “I’ve been reading.”

“For K-Kate?”

“Yeah.”

Jen makes a thoughtful noise. “L-Let me know if you need help.”

“Can do.” Her phone buzzes. (Kate Bishop: _cool, c u then._ ) Darcy swypes _okay_ before turning the envelope over in her hands. There’s only a single piece of folded paper inside, the message typed and succinct. _St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 2pm tomorrow. Wait in the confessional._

“Darcy?” asks Jen. Darcy crumples the paper up in her hands, and shakes her head.

“It’s nothing. Just a note from Oppie.” She throws the letter and the envelope in the trash. “Wanna watch _Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt_ with me? I feel the need to binge something.”

Jen gives her an unsure-but-game smile that Darcy hasn’t seen since their first few weeks of cohabitation, and goes to make them coffee.

Thankfully, the next day is a Thursday, which means that Jen works late and Karen is out of the apartment. Not only is it a Thursday, though, it’s _the_ Thursday, the Thursday where Matt and Foggy make their opening remarks for the Healy case; no one is going to try and keep her from leaving the house when she really shouldn’t be moving. Which is awesome, because fuck the police.

Darcy showers (her body is a patchwork of bruises and welts in the mirror, her fractured ribs pounding with every breath she takes; she _hates_ it) and then layers her face with make-up as best she can. She has to avoid touching the cuts, which are barely scabbed over, but she can at least cover up most of the bruises, and by the time she’s done she looks almost human again. Rewrapping her ribs is harder, but somehow she manages it. Then she grabs her wig, a blonde monstrosity she’d stolen from Lindsay in their senior year of undergrad, and her biggest pair of sunglasses before slinking out of the apartment.

She looks back over her shoulder every block or so, but she can’t see anyone following her. It doesn’t make her any less nervous.  

St. Patrick’s Cathedral is one that Darcy’s walked by but never entered, mostly because of being more of a synagogue-type person than a Quasimodo. (Even then she only really goes into synagogues at the end of Passover, when there’s awesome foods to be had, because organized religion makes her extraordinarily frustrated. But that’s beside the point.) She’s never understood the Catholic need to make their places of worship as intimidating as possible. Even the fences are spiky-looking, as if you’re supposed to impale yourself upon them in a fit of religious guilt. Darcy waits until the street is mostly clear, and then slips inside, worrying the sleeve of her Colombia hoodie between her fingers.

The cathedral is hauntingly, echoingly empty. There isn’t even a priest to take some of the loneliness away; just rows and rows of empty pews, and color dappling the floor where the sun is shining through the stained glass widow. The confessional is tucked into an alcove to the left of the stage, or the altar, or whatever it is that’s dominating the front of the room. Darcy dips her finger into the holy water ( _now tainted with Jew_ ) and then checks her phone. 1:57. The devil said two exactly, in the note. If it had even been the devil, and honestly she knows she’s being more than a little crazy for even thinking that this is a legit thing, because how the hell—

“Can I help you?”

Darcy jumps. Then she winces, because jumping hurts, and she should really stop doing that. The priest is older, nearly bald, but there’s a funny sort of mischief in his face that reminds her of some of the lithographs of cherubs in one of her art history textbooks. Darcy adjusts her glasses, and then shakes her head, slowly. “No. I mean—I’m supposed to meet someone here, I think. I just. I’m okay.”

It comes out like a question. _I’m okay, right_? The priest studies her for a moment, and his mouth thins. Then he smiles. “Don’t mind me. I’m just dusting; people don’t often come in on a weekday.”

“I guess.” 1:59. _Go away, please, priest._ “Thanks. Um—I’m sorry, I don’t even know what I would actually call you. I’m not really—um.”

“Catholic?”

“Yeah. That.”

The priest turns, and runs a dusty cloth down the back of one of the pews. “Father Lantom is all right. Father Patrick if you plan on meeting your friend here more than once.”

“Patrick like the cathedral?”

His smile’s honest this time. “A lucky coincidence. Or an unhappy one, depending on your point of view. You’re welcome to wait here as long as you need.”

She expects him to say something about how _God always welcomes no matter your religion_ , but he doesn’t. _Huh. Maybe he can read his audience._ Darcy wipes her hand on her comfy shorts, and then holds it out. “I’m—Lizzy.” _Darcy. Lizzy. Haha, it’s funny. But not._ “Pretty sure this won’t become a habit, but it’s nice to meet you, Father P.”

He shakes her hand twice (no hesitation, even though she’s hella bruised and wearing tiny shorts in a house of worship) and then collects his bucket. The look he gives her is long and unreadable, almost as though he’s trying to match imagination with reality. Then he shakes his head a little. “Likewise, Lizzy,” he says, and then he turns and vanishes through a door that she hadn’t noticed before, one that leads deeper into the church. Darcy stands there for a good minute, wavering and unsure, before she shakes her head (her mouth hurts) and pinches the inside of her wrist. _Get your head in the game, Lewis._ It’s 2:01 when she slips into the confessional, shutting the lattice door carefully behind her.

Nothing. Silence.

“Okay,” she says. “Now what?”

“He knows you were meeting me.”

“ _Jesus_.” Darcy flinches so violently that her wig goes lopsided. The devil is sitting in the box beside hers, facing forward, his mask pulled low over the bridge of his nose. “Oh. Shit. Wait, I’m in a church. Um. Jeez. Give a girl a little warning, dude.”

The devil doesn’t smile. The structure of his face is broken into pieces through the separating latticework. There’s a smudge of mouth here, a spot of stubble there; she catches a glimpse of the bone in his jaw before she tells herself off for it. He’s dark, with full lips and serious (and, if she’s being honest, some fairly glorious) neckbeard. That’s all she lets herself see before she matches him, turning to stare at the door to the confessional. She won’t try to see his face. She’s already decided it. “No wonder he looked so freaked.” She folds her hands over her thighs. “He owe you a favor or something?”

“Not really.” He doesn’t elaborate. “He doesn’t approve of me working with you.”

“I get the feeling that as a man of the church there’s a lot the good father doesn’t approve of.” Her fingers are sweaty. “This is weird. I don’t like churches.”

“Not a believer?”

He sounds like he’s laughing at her. Darcy scowls. “No, I’m just a seriously bad Jew. Why, are you?”

The silence echoes.

“Just trying to make conversation, jeez.”

“Check under your seat,” says the devil. Darcy frowns at the door to her box, and then bends down, groping under the hard wood bench with one hand. Her fingers scrape along tape, and two awkwardly-shaped lumps underneath. “Burner phone,” says the devil, pressing his shoulder into the dividing wall between their cubicles. “My number’s programmed in. Only use it if you have to.”

“Don’t call the vigilante for a bedtime story. Can do.” Darcy yanks the phone (and the micro USB charger, thank fuck) out from where they've been taped down. It’s fully charged— _huh, a polite devil, who knew_ —and there’s not one, but two numbers programmed in. One is marked with a _C_ ; the other, with a _D_. “I guess you’re D,” she says, and frowns. “But who’s C?”

“Someone who can help you if anyone else gets hurt.” He says it in a way that screams _don’t ask me more_ , but Darcy’s never been very good at following directions.

“Doctor? Nurse?”

“The less you know, the safer the both of you will be.”

Well, that’s clear as it gets. “Okay.” She tucks the phone into the pocket of her shorts. “So if I need to meet you—”

“Call. But only when you’re alone.” He shifts again. She wonders if he’s a fidgeter. “Did you tell anyone you were working with me?”

“No.”

“Not even your friends? Your housemate?”

“How did you—never mind. No. I didn’t say anything.”

“Good. Keep it that way.” He leans away from the wall again. “Talk to your client. Look into sources. If you find anything that you think I need to see, put an X in masking tape on the window in your bedroom. I’ll find you the same day.”

Creepy vigilante dude knows where she lives. _Okayyyyyy, so not freaking out about that._ “What if you find something out that _I_ need to see?”

“I’ll find you.”

 _Not freaking out about_ that, _either._ She swallows hard. “And if they come after me again?”

The devil goes still. “They won’t,” he says, and for some stupid, insane, godforsaken reason, she almost believes him. “I won’t let them.”

“That is both reassuring and incredibly terrifying.”

“I’m told I’m good at that.” He turns away from her. “You leave first. Wait five minutes in the coffee shop at the end of the block so I can make certain you weren’t followed. Then go back to your apartment.” He pauses. “Don’t look back when you leave.”

“So, _Spirited Away_ style. Can do.” She fixes her wig. “I’ll buy masking tape on the way home, too, just for you. Hopefully—” she stops. Hopefully what? Hopefully she won’t have to use it much? Hopefully she doesn’t get in too deep? What? “Stay safe,” she says instead. “I don’t think you’d rock bruises too well.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

Darcy leaves the church without a single backward glance. When she turns on the corner, though, she sees Father Patrick standing in the doorway, watching her go with his hand slightly raised, as if he’s invoking a blessing. It makes the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

.

.

.

It takes a week before the case with John Healy starts to wrap up, and another three days beyond that before people finally stop fussing long enough for Darcy to make her escape out into the world again. Matt and Foggy are gone most days, but Karen isn’t; aside from her mysterious lunch meetings (she gets fidgety whenever Darcy asks, so Darcy’s pretty sure it has something to do with Union Allied and the Big Payoff of Insanity) they have the offices to themselves. They practice Spanish (Karen’s pretty fluent; Darcy’s terribly rusty); Darcy goes over basic paralegal duties with Karen just in case they get a client that isn’t hugely fake or enormously troublesome or both, and Darcy digs into Bishop v. Goodman with both hands. She still can’t get into contact with Brigid O’Reilly, which is getting more worrying than frustrating. Thankfully, the whiteboard she’d screwed into her bedroom wall at her and Jen’s apartment transfers over well to the newly-painted walls in her and Matt’s office; she can spread out and magnet things to the wall, give herself space to work.

The afternoon before the closing of the Healy case, all four of them are clustered into her and Matt’s office. Her ribs hurts, her back hurts, her face hurts, and most of all her head hurts, and if she has to hear Foggy toss and catch that baseball one more time, she’s going to scream. She gets to her feet. “Anybody want coffee?”

The whole room freezes. On the other side of Matt’s desk, Foggy watches her with a pursed-lips constipated look that he only wears when he’s trying not to shout. Karen is a deer in the headlights, pupils blown wide, and Matt? Matt’s just frowning. She blinks a few times. “What?”

“What, she says.” Foggy pushes his laptop mostly closed, and sighs. “Is the fact that someone threw you in an alley and beat the shit out of you the last time you went walking alone escaping you, or—?”

Darcy scowls. “Okay, I get that you’re trying to keep me safe and everything, but that sounded really shitty, so maybe work on your delivery. How about, _Hey, Darcy, I’m worried about you going off alone, why don’t I come with you?_ ”

“You’d just say no to that, because you’re stubborn.”

“Yeah, because the coffee place is a block away, and it’s still light outside.” She’s also not entirely sure if Robbie Goodman and his goons are going to try to beat the shit out of her again so soon after they failed so spectacularly, but that’s neither here nor there. “I want to go on my own, Foggy. I can’t hide in the offices or in my apartment my whole life. Besides, they don’t want me dead; they just want to rough me up a little bit to try and get me to back off. So, at most, broken bones.” Karen makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, and Darcy hates herself. “Sorry, Kare.”

“I’m okay.” Karen shakes her head. “You’re sure you’ll be all right?”

“Are you even listening to yourself right now?” Foggy scoffs. “Going somewhere on your own in like five years when we’re absolutely sure nobody’s going to try and kill you, sure, but now? When you’re still—”

“Still what? Still purple?” Darcy shrugs. “I’m not gonna shatter, Foggy. I’m a big girl.”

“You had the shit kicked out of you last week, and I’m still not entirely sure that you don’t have brain damage.” Foggy pushes his chair back from the desk. “I’ll go with you.”

“You will sit _right there_ and wait until I come back. I’m serious, Franklin. I can go on my own.”

Karen’s eyes narrow, and flick between Darcy and Foggy.

“Darcy, seriously—Matt, am I wrong, or—”

“If it were you or Matt would you still be freaking out this much?” Darcy glares. “Don’t be sexist. I’m not _broken_ , Foggy. I can walk a block, buy coffee, and come back, and if _you agree with him, Matt Murdock, I will hurt you_.”

Matt lifts his hands in a _peace_ gesture. “Both of you are right. Just—can we hold on, just for a second?”

“ _No_ ,” say Darcy and Foggy at once. Darcy glares at the ceiling. Foggy says, “I’m not saying you can’t take care of yourself, I’m _saying_ that it’s maybe not the smartest idea in the world to go wandering off on your own when someone tried to knock your teeth into the back of your throat _a week ago_. I’d be saying this to Matt, too. Hell, I’d say this to Hulk Hogan. It’s kind of a fucking stupid idea.”

“And _I’m_ saying that it’s _my choice_ and I _refuse_ to act like a victim in my own fucking city!”

“For Christ’s sake, Darcy—”

“Foggy.” Karen’s voice is like a whipcrack. “She’s fine.”

Foggy opens his mouth, and then closes it again. “But—”

“She’s _fine_ ,” Karen says again. “If she says she’s fine, then she’s fine.”

For three heartbeats, they all just stare at each other. Then Foggy sinks slowly back down into his chair, like he’s trying to pacify a tiger. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. I don’t get it, but okay.”

Darcy rolls her eyes up to the ceiling. “ _Thank_ you. Karen, matcha?”

“Please.”

“Matt?”

Matt shakes his head. So, black coffee with sugar, then. Darcy glances at Foggy. “You want anything?”

“Uh.” Foggy blinks at her. “Maybe a latte, I don’t know.”

Darcy grabs her purse. “I’ll be back in like half an hour, tops. Don’t blow anything up while I’m gone, and if _any_ of you touch my whiteboard, I will destroy everything you love.”

“Half an hour, Lewis.” Foggy makes a menacing gesture with his hands that probably means he’ll tickle her to death or something. “ _Exactly_ half an hour, or we come after you.”

“Fine. Be good.”

She’s halfway down the stairs to the street when she hears someone call her name. Darcy turns, and bites back a snarl when she sees Matt, caneless and missing his coat. His fingers are just barely touching the wall, as if he’s trying to orient himself in space. “What part of _I’ll be okay—_ ”

“Cell phone,” he says, and lifts his other hand. Sure enough, there’s her cell, complete with the obnoxious bell that she’d attached just so Matt would be able to tell where she was in space. (She still hasn’t told him that. She’s pretty sure he thinks that she did it just to drive Foggy crazy, because Foggy _hates_ that banana bell.) She'd taken the lump of her burner phone in her pocket to be her actual real-person phone. Darcy kicks herself. “And you forgot to grab money for the drinks.”

 _Way to be an asshole, Lewis._ She takes the steps two at a time, and stops just shy of the landing. Matt holds out the money and the phone, and she shoves both into her pocket. “Sorry. Shouldn’t have snapped.”

Matt lifts one shoulder in half a shrug. From this angle, she can see most of the fading bruise around his eye, the lingering puffiness of his cheekbone. Darcy thinks of Karen, and snorts.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She shakes her head. “All of us look like shit but Foggy. It’s like…I don’t know. I feel like it’s just a matter of time before someone punches him in the face, too.” She scowls. “Come to think of it, I might be the one to do the punching.”

Matt laughs, and Darcy congratulates herself. Something’s been off in Matt for the past few days; it’s not anything she can put her finger on, not anything overt, but at the same time he just hasn’t been acting much like Matt. Now she’s dragged one of his Kermit the Frog laughs out of him, the ones that are nearly silent, and she hadn’t even had to try that hard. _Maybe he’s doing better than I thought_. Darcy runs a hand over her sore ribs, and then looks up at Matt again. There’s another bruise under his jaw, and she’d think it was a hickey if not for the rest of his face. “Jesus,” she says, and reaches out, lifting his chin with one finger to get a better look at it. Matt jumps, but doesn’t protest. “Your stairs really hate you, how did this even happen?”

“I think it’s more my feet that are the problem than the stairs.” He catches her wrist, and tugs her hand down. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. Your feet are dumb.” She pulls away, and nudges the back of his wrist with her fingertips. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“I heard from the doctor about how bad you look. Besides, it’d probably just hurt if I—” He shakes his head. “Not a good idea.”

“Just take your dumb glasses off, Murdock. I’m giving you permission to touch my face. You know how many guys would kill for this chance? And you get it for free.”

Matt runs his hand over his face. “The ICU doctor said the only reason your cheekbone didn’t fracture was because you went with the punch, instead of against it. I don’t want to make anything worse.”

“Matt, seriously. You’re not going to hurt me. You have butterfly hands.” Darcy brushes his shoulder in warning. “And mostly this is an excuse because I still haven’t seen your bruises. So I’m going to steal your glasses, okay?”

He freezes under her fingers. Then, slowly, he relaxes. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

He Kermit-laughs again, just for a second. “Okay.”

Darcy moves slowly. She has to stand quite close to him in order to get the sunglasses off without poking him in the eye, and when she manages it, she hooks the earpiece through the top of her shirt to keep them safe and out of the way. Matt keeps his eyes closed, bending forward just slightly so she can see better, and Darcy hisses. His eye is swollen and fragile looking, not purple like she expected, but a strange vivid yellow-green that makes her stomach churn. There’s another, fresher bruise over his cheekbone, shaped like a triangle, and a scab in his eyebrow from where the skin split. She brushes her finger over it, and then sighs. “Don’t fall down the stairs again, okay? It’s not a good look for you.”

His mouth quirks, but he doesn’t say anything. When Darcy touches his cheek, though, he leans his head into it the way Darla does. She presses her palm full against his jaw. _Note to self—Matt Murdock is touch-starved._ Maybe she really should start painting his nails again, just to give him an excuse for a hug.

“You okay?” she asks, soft enough that she’s half-certain she’s imagined it. Matt blinks his eyes open, tipping his cheek into her hand until her fingers are knotting in his hair, and seriously, she needs to start hugging Matt more often, because he _never_ does shit like this. He’s never really liked people being able to see his eyes, not like this. He thinks they scare people, the fixed blankness of them. He’d only ever told her that once, and he'd been drunk enough that he probably doesn't even remember doing it, but it’s still stuck in Darcy’s head, the expression on his face as he said it. Like it’s his fault other people find him unsettling.

She wants to hurt the people who made him think that. She always has, and she always will.

“I’m fine,” he says, but the way he curls closer to her, like he’s seeking warmth, speaks the lie. “You’re the one who had the crap kicked out of you.”

“And I have the bruises to show for it.” She smiles in spite of herself, and then flinches when it tugs at her scabbed lip. “Ow.”

“What?”

“It’s nothing.” She catches his hands in hers, and raises them to her shoulders. “Just my lip. See?”

Matt doesn’t move. His eyes are fixed at some point over her head. His mouth twists. “Darcy—”

“Matt.” She squeezes his fingers. “Seriously. Shut up and touch my face.”

“I don’t—”

“I told you, butterfly hands.” She tilts her head. “Besides, I know you. You’ll stress until you know how bad it is, and it’s probably not nearly so terrible as you’re thinking. I don’t bruise all that easy.”

Matt huffs. Still, he doesn’t pull away. He lifts his hands, ghosting his index finger over her collarbone by accident (Darcy holds her breath, because _fuck you, Darcy Lewis, don’t you dare freak out_ ) as he traces the line of her neck up to her jaw. His thumb clips her dangly feather earrings. Then he finds the first scab, where the knife coasted through the skin on her throat, and he goes still. “Knife?”

“Yeah.”

He pulls his hands back until his fingertips are a hair’s-breadth from actually touching her skin, and keeps going. He follows the line of her jaw (bruises along the bone, her cheek swollen from where it had split inside) to the shape of her nose (thankfully not nearly as bad as the rest, though it’s still a little bruised and tender). Her face feels swollen and uncomfortable as Matt’s fingers run, moth-light, over the swelling around her eye, the three splits in her eyebrow, the cuts on the bridge of her nose from where her glasses jammed into her face. His mouth tightens when he finds the scabs on her lips, but other than that he doesn’t react at all.

It barely takes a minute, and when it’s over Matt scrubs his hands on his pants as if he’s trying to erase the feel of it from his skin. Darcy swallows. “So, was it as bad as you thought it was?”

“Darcy.” He shakes his head, not at her, but at the world. “Jesus.”

“Hey.” Darcy hops up the last step onto the landing, and then tucks herself into him. She does it gingerly, because a) she’s not sure how far down his bruises go, and b) she’s really not sure how much _her_ ribs are up for at the moment, but she does it. Matt goes absolutely still, just for a second, before he lets out a long breath and relaxes into her, sliding his fingers into her hair. Darcy lays her cheek on his shoulder, closing her eyes. “I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I think I get to decide whether I’m okay or not, Murdock. I’m seriously fine. I’m just—” _Angry_. Darcy bites her tongue, and curls her toes in her shoes so she doesn’t wince. “I don’t like feeling helpless. That’s all.”

“It shouldn’t have happened.” The words dust over her hair, vibrate into her ribs. Darcy laces her fingers together behind his back, and presses closer. “You shouldn’t have had to get hurt.”

“C’est la vie, Matthew.” She sighs. “I’m okay, I really am. So don’t worry about me, all right?”

He doesn’t say anything. He just shakes his head, and then he pulls her close, hard and fast, so that in less than a breath she’s halfway out of her shoes with his nose in her hair and his fingers digging into her hip. It’s like—she doesn’t know, really. Like he’s trying to confirm to himself that she’s actually there, that she exists. Darcy leans up into him and wonders— _what the hell is going on with you, Matt?_

“Tell me the truth this time.” She turns her face into his throat. “Are you okay?”

Matt’s silent for a long time. Then he sighs. It tickles her ear. “I don’t know,” he says, and the words come out odd, like he has to chisel them out of stone. “I don’t—know.”

“Because of the case with Healy?”

He shakes his head. He smells like Matt, like shampoo and shaving cream and the warmth of his skin all at once, and it’s indescribably comforting. Darcy hooks her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck, and he sighs again, in a different way, like he’s finally letting go of something painful. “I don’t know,” he says again, and her heart breaks a little. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay.” She closes her eyes. “You don’t have to know. It’s okay to not be okay.”

Matt freezes again. His sunglasses are poking into her breastbone. Then he hides his face in her hair. They stand like that for a time, a century or a minute, she’s not entirely sure, before he lets her go. Darcy takes his hands as he tries to slip away, holding on tight.

“Glasses,” she says, and presses them into his palm. Matt curls his fingers around them.

“Thanks.”

“Matt.” He pauses, halfway gone already. “You don’t have to know. And you don’t have to tell me. But I’m here, if you need me. Okay?”

They’re still standing close enough for her to see the way Matt’s pulse jumps in his throat, like she’s said something terrifying. He wraps his fingers hard around hers, and Darcy squeezes back. Then he lets go, and Darcy hooks her bag up higher over her shoulder. She clears her throat. “I’ll be back in a bit, okay? I’ll call you guys if anything happens.”

She’s halfway down the stairs when she hears Matt take a step. “Darcy.”

“Yeah?”

Matt opens his mouth. Then he shakes his head, and puts his glasses back on. The tiredness is still there, and the oddness, but it’s…she can’t describe it. It’s _different_ , deeply, ineffably different, and there’s no other way to say it. “It’s nothing,” he says. “Never mind.”

He’s gone before Darcy can think of what to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is more of a connective chappie than anything, but! Plot is happening! And, bonus, as of this chapter we are through Episode Three: _Rabbit in a Snowstorm_! So, right on track. Sort of. (The first chapter is kind of pre-series, so Chap. 2 is equivalent to _Into the Ring_ , and Chap. 3 to _Cut Man_ , even if they're not timeline exact.) At this point, Claire and Matt have met, Matt is suffering from his stab wound and his Mighty Angst, Healy (in the bits immediately post-this chap) has decided to stab himself in the face, and Matt's had Fisk's name dropped into his head. 
> 
> Also! We get some Wesley next chapter. Also some Nobu. And more Kate. Because I'm cool like that.
> 
> I'm going to be focusing less on the legal aspect of Darcy's investigation and more on the plot aspects of it from next chapter on, once Darcy's actually, you know, physically capable of doing more investigative stuff. Broken ribs _hurt,_ you guys.
> 
> Please donate to the Hug A Hero fund. Every review means that all your favorite heroes will get hugs. It's good for them, even if they think it's not. (I'm looking at you, James Buchanan Barnes.) 
> 
> (I'm sincerely considering writing a Darcy-starts-the-Hug-A-Hero fund ficlet series, because seriously, _everyone needs hugs_.)


	5. The Writing On The Wall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for: transphobia, panic attacks, discussion of healing wounds, discussion of rape, survivor-confronting-rapist dynamics (mild compared to what they could have been, but definitely intense), discussion of murder, assault, and gang violence, and discussion of assault. 
> 
> Question: I’m looking for someone who would be willing to build a cover for a The Price Of War music mix! I’d be willing to write you a Darcy oneshot of your choice if you do so. :D (Generally I don’t do smut all that well [I’m not very good at it, especially het smut] but I can try if you’d like that. /shrug)
> 
> The mix is listed at the end of this chapter if you’re interested! I have it playlisted on YT (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLON1sJPXMDJ3pIFHRAYCFZQ05EyWl38TM), and to be entirely honest it's still a work in progress. But! I just want a cover for it for 8tracks and Tumblr, and then I can post it, officially. 
> 
> Also once again, unbeta'ed, all errors mine.

“Holy shit,” says Kate.

Darcy looks up from her computer. She’s back in Mug Shots, her bandaged arm covered with a worn long-sleeved shirt underneath her suit jacket, and for the first time since the hospital she’s gone make-up-less in public. She’d thought her face looked a hell of a lot better, considering the evidence photos she has sitting on her desk. She’s barely even purple anymore, and the swelling has gone down a _lot_ ; she’s actually seriously impressed with her body’s ability to heal itself. Apparently, though, she doesn’t look nearly as good as she thought, because Kate looks ready to lose her grip on her coffee cup. Darcy leans forward and plugs the mug from Kate’s fingers before her laptop becomes a latte coffin. Kate jumps, and then looks down at her empty hands. “You weren’t kidding,” she says. “You look fucking terrible, Lewis.”

“I know, right? I think I have bruises on my scalp, even.”

Next to Darcy, Karen makes a disapproving noise. For once, she’s twisted her hair away from her face, up into a high ponytail that shows off her throat (now almost completely bruise-free); her T-shirt says _I’m not saying I’m Batman—I’m just saying you’ve never seen him and me in the same place._ Darcy’s efforts to get Karen to relax her wardrobe a bit are working, and it’s _freaking awesome_. “That’s not a good thing, Darcy.”

“Are you kidding? It’s sick and I love it. Don’t be a hater, Page.”

Kate doesn’t laugh. “You weren’t like this on Friday. What happened?’

“Well, I was. I just had a shit-ton of make-up on.” Darcy swirls her coffee in the mug, and licks at the froth on the top of her mocha. “I was mugged last week, didn’t I tell you? Cops grabbed him before he could get away, thankfully, but he still managed to kick the crap out of me first. No big deal. Now sit down and eat a scone before you hurt yourself.”

Darcy has to actually nudge the plate of lavender scones at her before Kate realizes they exist. She’s still watching Darcy through narrowed eyes, as if she’s trying to pick out a lie. Darcy flutters her eyelashes, and then looks down at her computer again. Kate strikes her as the sort of person to freak out if someone else gets hurt for trying to help her, and they’re not going to ever get any work done if Kate learns right away that Robbie Goodman had sent a few gangbangers to rough Darcy up. So, that’s that. She’ll tell Kate later, when she’s in too deep to get away, but until then it’s better to keep it quiet.

Karen, who’d been apprised of this plan approximately fifteen minutes before Kate had come through the door, stares hard at her coffee and says nothing.

“Oh, right.” Darcy waves her hand at Karen. “Kate, this is Karen. Karen, Kate. Karen’s here to observe and take notes, because she’s new to the firm and wants to learn more about law and stuff.”

“Also because she’s buying me coffee,” says Karen, and winks at Kate. To Darcy’s utter astonishment, Kate actually blushes.

“The coffee here is definitely better than the stuff at the office,” Darcy agrees. “No offense to your press, dear.”

“None taken. It’s the beans that are the problem, not my press.”

“Also that Foggy doesn’t wash it out the way he’s supposed to.”

“That, too.”

“So.” Darcy opens up her notes. “I’m still trying to get in touch with Brigid O’Reilly. Her boss won’t give me her contact information, which is super sketch—I think maybe you were right when you said that Robbie Goodman had her reassigned—but I’ve been looking into a few other ways to get into contact with her, and I should be able to get into the 34th and talk to her tomorrow. Also, I’ve been meeting with your friend Callie and her lawyer, and they’ve agreed to testify as long as Callie’s given some kind of immunity for her drug habit. Obviously we can’t get her off completely, but since it’s her first offense—”

Kate snorts.

“—her first _official_ offense, I should be able to bully the district attorney to just shunt her off to an easy judge in the drug courts. She’ll get a few weeks of community service, maybe a little bit of rehab if the judge doesn’t like the cut of her jib, and since she’s seventeen the whole thing will be sealed.”

“Lucky Callie.”

“The glory of the juvenile justice system.” Darcy shrugs. “I talked to the bouncer at the club, and the bartender, and they’re willing to testify too. There was a warrant issued to get the surveillance footage from Daily Daze the night you were there, but somehow it went _mysteriously_ missing, so I’m going to go talk to the judge that issued it and see what’s up. I left a message with her clerk of court, so she should hopefully get back to me in a day or two.” She chews on the lid of her pen for a minute. “If we’re _really_ lucky we might be able to get one of Goodman’s friends to testify, and hang themselves with their own noose.”

Kate makes a disbelieving sound. “He gets their drugs for them. I’m pretty sure that they were all high out of their minds anyway. They might not—they might not even remember.”

“Even Goodman?”

“No. He’s smart enough not to take any of his own shit. He just sells it.”

Dammit. They can’t get him there, anyway—drug possession and sale are on a totally different legal territory than rape and assault, and it’s not Darcy’s case anyway—but she still makes a mental note to ask Brett about it. Maybe, if worst comes to worst, Rich Goodman can swing for his drugs instead of his rapes. But only if worst comes to worst. “Ah, well. Still worth looking into it. I’m frankly more interested in why none of these guys seem to have records, but that’s just me.”

“They’re rich white assholes whose daddies have lots of money?” Kate shrugs. “I don’t know. They’ve just never been arrested, I guess.”

“Hopefully we’ll change that.” Darcy folds her hands on the table. “I do need you to understand that because we’re acting as both the investigators and the prosecutors in this, it’s gonna be weird. Half the stuff I need from the cops hasn’t been done, or has been misplaced, quote unquote, and we really need to decide which case is more important—the procedures against Rich Goodman, or the allegations against the police department in their mishandling of it all. Legally, I can’t be the one to prosecute Rich Goodman for his criminal acts, because of that ruling I told you about, Kamper v. Vonderheide _._ But hopefully we’ll be able to splash enough of this over the press for the criminal justice system to get their asses in gear and prosecute.”

“Wait,” says Karen. “What?”

Despite the pow-wow last Friday, even Kate still looks confused. Ooh, yay. She gets to explain law. “Criminal law and civil law are different.” Darcy scoots her laptop to the side, and steals Kate’s mug, setting it next to hers on the table. “This is civil law,” she says, pointing at Kate’s latte. “And this is criminal law. What did you order?”

“Um.” She blinks at Darcy. “Just a café latte. Is that important?”

“Sort of.” Darcy turns Kate’s mug until the handle is facing Kate. “Your café latte and my mocha latte are made of the same stuff, but the contents are different. Civil law, and civil courts, deal only with civil suits. Criminal law and criminal courts deal with criminal cases, which are prosecuted by the district attorney’s office. So if I were OJ Simpson—”

“Because you’re totally OJ Simpson. Can I have my coffee back?”

She smacks Kate’s wrist. “Don’t touch the latte.”

“Bitch.”

“Jerk.” Darcy rolls her eyes. “If I were OJ Simpson, then I would be vindicated in criminal court—” she pushes the mocha latte mug “—because of botched evidence and due process issues. But I was sued later in _civil_ court, which doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not I’m guilty or innocent.  Everyone _knew_ OJ had killed Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goodman, and their families wanted restitution. They won a lot of money off him, like…twenty-five million or something.”

Kate’s eyebrows knit together. “So bringing a criminal case against Rich Goodman is gonna be harder than bringing a civil suit?”

“I wouldn’t be the one to do it. You’d have to talk to the DA’s office for that one.” Darcy wrinkles her nose. “Same with the police fuck-ups. We can sue the fuck out of them and claim compensation for the emotional damage that has been done to you in the course of this quite terrible series of events, but I don’t have the legal standing to prosecute the police department—or the Goodmans, by the way—as if I’m part of the DA’s office.”

Karen nods. Kate, though: Kate just crosses her arms over her chest, and scowls at the coffee mugs. “That’s fucking _stupid_.”

“Didn’t say that the US justice system is flawless, Katie. This is just how it works at the moment.” Darcy takes her mocha back, before Kate can broil it away with the power of her stare. “How’re things going with your dad? You said you were going to talk to him about all of this.”

“He went to Manila.” Kate tears her scone in half. “Which means he’s pissed at me and he doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“Which also means he won’t try to stop you,” Darcy points out, and Kate’s eyebrows stop doing their evil dance of death. “Or, at least, he won’t notice what we’re doing until it’s too _late_ for him to stop us, which is almost as good. Oh, speaking of—Karen, do you want to come with us? We’re on our way to meet with Robbie Goodman.”

Karen chokes on her macchiato. It takes a good ten seconds of back-pounding, shrieking (someone’s mocha had gone flying, and it was only the hair trigger of an archer that had rescued Darcy’s computer from a caffeinated grave), and a truly impressive scowl from the barista before they finally manage to get Karen breathing properly again. In Darcy’s pocket, her phone buzzes.

“Are you _crazy_?” Karen hisses, when Kate flees to collect more napkins. “The guy has you _beaten up in an alley_ and you organized a meeting with him?”

“His secretary will be there.” Darcy shrugs. “And technically it’s not just with Robbie Goodman, it’s with Rich Goodman, and their lawyer too. Like, the trifecta of bad guys. It’ll be awesome.”

“And you didn’t tell me this because—”

“—because I knew you would freak out? Also because you’re not dressed for a meeting at Goodman and Okumura, and it’s in, like—” she checks her banana phone “—forty minutes. Me and Katie-Kate are barely going to make it if we catch a taxi _now_.”

“Don’t call me Katie-Kate,” says Kate, and dumps half a box of napkins onto the table. “It’s gross and I don’t like it.”

“But it’s cute.”

“ _Don’t_ call me Katie-Kate.”

“I was going to go to the _Bulletin_ after if you want to meet us there.” Karen gets shifty-eyed and squirrely, and Darcy thinks, _ah-hah._ “There are some nice reporters there who might be willing to talk to us about building a story against the Goodmans. I was thinking maybe the same guy who did the story on Union Allied? He seems ballsy.”

“Ben Urich?” Kate actually smiles. It changes her whole face; she goes from rebellious, angry goth warrior to Actual Teenage Girl Kate Bishop, and it’s honestly a little scary. “He’s cool. He did an interview with me and my dad once, when Dad made this huge donation to the Rebuild Midtown fund. He doesn’t take shit.”

“Sounds like good people.” Darcy shoves her laptop into her bag. Her phone buzzes again, and she realizes—her banana phone’s in her hand. It’s her burner phone that’s ringing. _Shit._ She dips her hand into her pocket, and hits the decline button. “So, Karen, you coming?”

“Um, no.” Karen gets up super-fast. “Well, I mean, not to the _Bulletin_ , and I don’t think they’ll let me past the first floor in this—” the look she gives Darcy is one that says _I know what you’re up to, young lady;_ Darcy bounces her eyebrows in reply. “—but I can wait in a Starbucks or something nearby. If you guys don’t mind, anyway.”

“Why would we mind?” Darcy hooks an arm around Kate’s shoulders, and squeezes. Kate just rolls her eyes. Still—she doesn’t flinch, which is only to the good. “I’ll be sure to record everything, if they let me. And I’ll tell you next time we meet with them; you should come along and see how everything works, y’know?”

Karen smiles. It looks a little vicious. “Of course.”

“I love you, don’t leave salt in my sugar bowl.” She kisses Karen’s cheek (Karen looks surprised, but hugs her anyway) and then glances over at Kate. “Can you go flag us a taxi, Kate? I have to return a call.”

Kate rolls her eyes, and goes off muttering something about PDA and gross girlfriends. Karen and Darcy look at each other.

“I feel like I should stroke your hair or something, just to make her uncomfortable,” says Karen, and Darcy snorts.

“Wait until the next time you meet her, it’ll be even _worse_ then.”

“You’re a terrible human being,” Karen says, but it’s in an appreciative voice. “Text me when you’re done, I’ll let you know where I am.”

“Can do, girlfriend.”

Darcy blows her a kiss, hitches her bag over her shoulder, and waits until she’s out of Karen’s line of sight before digging her burner phone out of her pocket. Sure enough, there it is: one missed call from D, without a follow-up text or even a voicemail. Darcy hits the redial button, and steps out of the way of the crowd, tucking herself between a bench and a potted plant just out of sight of the street corner. Thankfully, she can still see Kate; she wears enough purple to stand out.

The devil picks up on the first ring. “What are you doing right now?”

“Usually we have to go on at _least_ three dates before I give you that kind of information.” Kate’s arguing with a street hustler about something or other. Darcy wonders if she ought to intervene. “I’m on a street corner, waiting for a taxi. I have a meeting with Goodman and his lawyers. Why are you calling me in the daytime? I thought you were more a Batman kind of dude, you know. _I am darkness. I am the night._ ”

There’s an odd, smothered cough from the other end of the line. If the devil’s laughing at her, though, he doesn’t say it. “I was going to call last night, but something came up. I have some information for you that you might like to hear.”

“By _something_ , do you mean all those guys who were dumped on the front doorstep of the 15th precinct at four in the morning? Because if you do, that is some hella something.”

“What do you know about Goodman and Okamura?”

“I mean, not a lot.” She plugs her other ear with one finger. His voice is muffled, somehow, as if he’s holding the phone some distance away from his face. Maybe someone punched him? “Trading conglomerate that started up in 2001, right before 9/11. Works with a bunch of different people all over the world, mostly big-name companies. Goodman was some kind of heir to something or other, poured a lot of money into it. Okamura’s a big property owner in—Malaysia, I think?”

“Indonesia. Keep going.”

“They do a lot of property juggling in Southeast Asia, oversee a lot of manufacturing companies and shit. I didn’t look into them too deeply because I was, you know, more interested in the fact that they beat me up to keep me from prosecuting a rape case. Why are you asking?”

The devil’s quiet for a moment. On the corner, Kate finally waves down a taxi. She turns around, and Darcy hisses under her breath. “Fast is good, dude, I have a ride to catch.”

“The Okamura portion of the Goodman-Okamura conglomerate is a front,” says the devil abruptly. “Three years ago it was bought out by a shadow company under the management of a man named Hironobu Kurihara, who, according to my sources, doesn’t actually exist.”

“And who are your sources, exactly?” Darcy presses the phone to her ear with her shoulder, shifting her bag around in an attempt to wade through the crowd without losing it.

“If you apply enough pressure to a crack, the dam fractures.”

“Is that your way of saying you beat some guys up until you found a more important guy to beat up?”

“My way was more poetic.”

“If you say so, dude.” She checks her watch. “Seriously, you have forty-five seconds.”

“Hironobu Kurihara might not actually exist, in Japan or otherwise, but the man that I spoke to—”

“—your crack in the dam—”

“—that the head of the yakuza in Hell’s Kitchen goes by the common alias of Hironobu Orihara while he’s stateside.”

Darcy stops in the middle of the sidewalk. A guy in a sharp suit clips into her shoulder, and sends a bolt of pain through her fractured rib. “Son of a _bitch_ ,” she says. “Are you telling me that the Goodman-Okamura Trading Group is a _front for the Japanese mafia_?”

“There’s evidence that supports it.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do with that information?” Her voice is high and reedy, even to her. “I’m not—I’m not a judge, or a cop, or _anything_ —for god’s sake, my office still smells like a bookie’s ashtray! You take that kind of shit to the DA’s office, not to people like me!”

“Yeah,” says the devil. “But the DA’s office hasn’t been trying to strike bargains with me in dark alleyways, so you’re kind of all I have right now.”

“Jesus.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. A few yards away, Kate makes an impatient noise. (“Come _on_ , Lewis, we’re gonna be late!”) “Jesus—okay. I’ll. Um. I’ll look into it. And—uh. I’ll probably have something for you in a couple hours.”

“Be on your fire escape at midnight,” he says. “I’ll find you.”

He hangs up before she can say goodbye.

The Goodman and Okamura Tower is one of the few ‘scrapers to have survived the incident without a single scratch. The building stands a good twenty storeys higher than anything else in the financial district; all glass and shining chrome, it looks like a monument to the future and the digital era, and the only place that outstrips it at this point has to be Tony Stark’s monument to his own dick.

Sorry. Avengers Tower. She gets confused.

Kate says very little on their way over to the Goodman Tower, hiding behind her sunglasses and her lipstick. Darcy clicks her tongue piercing against the back of her teeth, Googling every imaginable thing about the yakuza that she can manage, and a little bit more thanks to some time spent waiting in line at the front desk. The receptionist fawns over Kate (“Miss Bishop, it’s so _nice_ to see you, your father was _just_ talking about you the last time he was in here—”) and ignores Darcy almost entirely, giving them both visitor’s badges and directing them to the sixtieth floor (“oh, the _private_ elevator is down at the end, Miss Bishop, just tell Oz, the guard, your name and he’ll send you right in”). The muzak in the elevator car makes her teeth ache. Darcy waits until Kate’s jammed the button for the sixtieth floor three times in quick succession before clearing her throat. “If this is too much, you can wait outside of the meeting room. You don’t have to see him if you don’t want to.”

“What I _want_ ,” Kate says, through gritted teeth, “is for my father not to have locked my bow in his _fucking_ safe room, so I can put an arrow through Rich Goodman’s _fucking eye socket_. But barring that, I will settle for _scaring the living shit out of him_.”

She’s scaring the living shit out of Darcy, to be entirely honest. Darcy catches her elbow in one hand. “Kate,” she says. “Can you do this?

Kate blinks at her over the top of her sunglasses. “What?”

“ _Can you do this_ , Kate. Tell me now.”

Kate’s quiet for a moment. Then she straightens, until her spine is so taut it could snap at the slightest touch. “Yeah,” she says, clearing her throat. “Yes. I can do this.”

“Good,” Darcy says, and lets Kate go. “Don’t threaten him while we’re in there, okay? It’d look bad.”

“Whatever.”

If the outside of Goodman-Okamura is a wonder of silver and chrome, the inside is like something out of the Jetsons. Everything’s made out of glass and steel, and if she has to see her face reflected that many times for more than an hour she might crack like an egg. Darcy hooks her hair up out of her face and into a ponytail, smooths down the front of her suit (the low-cut one; when in doubt, distract with boobs) and then folds her hands neatly behind her back. Kate, on the other hand, stands with legs spread and arms akimbo, as if she’s about to pick a fight. “Be polite,” Darcy says through her teeth. “It scares them more if you’re nice.”

“That’s what you think.”

She hears a door open, and close. Darcy wipes her suddenly sweaty palms against her skirt, and smiles. Robbie Goodman looks almost exactly like his paparazzi photographs—that is, very Rush Limbaugh—and his suit is probably more expensive than the entirety of Darcy’s student loans combined, but his face is wreathed in smiles as he comes towards them, hands outstretched. “Ah, Katherine! It’s so lovely to see you. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Five years, at least.”

“I think seven,” says Kate. She doesn’t remove her hands from her pockets. Robbie Goodman drops his, ignoring Darcy entirely. “Not since you visited my father while we were doing that deal in Switzerland, I think.”

“That sounds right.” Robbie dimples at her. “You look…well.”

“If that’s code for saying ‘you have tits now,’ then, yeah. I look well.” Kate doesn’t smile. “This isn’t a social call, Mr. Goodman. I thought I made that clear to your secretary.”

“She said something or other about you bringing a lawyer for some reason, but I wasn’t sure if she was actually being serious. How’s Barnard, Katherine? Still going well? A little birdie told me you were majoring in art history; there’s a really lovely gallery that just opened in the area recently, I know the proprietor, I’m sure she’d be happy to show you around—”

“Hi,” says Darcy loudly, and shoves her hand into middle of it. Robbie Goodman looks surprised, at first. Then his eyes widen. She has to dig her nails into the back of his plushy marshmallow wrist in order to get him to shake. Her skin crawls at the touch. _You wanted me scared?_ she thinks, staring Robbie Goodman right in the eye. _Too bad. I’m pissed, instead._ “My name’s Darcy Lewis. With Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis. I’ll be representing Miss Bishop today. I’m afraid we’re on a bit of a timeline today, so I’d appreciate it if we could get right down to business.”

Robbie Goodman blinks at her. Then he blinks again. “My dear,” he says, unctuous as oil, “is that a bruise on your eye?”

“Yeah,” says Darcy, and bares her teeth. She hopes that her blood-red lipstick makes her look stained. “That’s the thing, though. Bruises heal.”

He squeezes her hand once, hard. “They do indeed. I’ll collect the others, then, shall I?”

“Please,” says Darcy, and checks her nails. Kate’s eyes have turned to slits. “I only have one or two things to say, and then we’ll be going. Is your son here, by any chance?”

“Rich?” Robbie’s look of confusion is perfectly rehearsed. “Well, yes—I’ve been grooming him to take a position here, now that he’s wrapping up his years at school, but I’m not sure what he has to do with this.”

“Mr. Goodman, do me a favor? Cut the bullshit.” She checks her phone. “The only reason we’re here is a courtesy call. Frankly, it’d be much easier just to meet with that gentleman at the _Bulletin_. If you’d prefer that—”

“That’s unnecessary, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know what I think at this point.”

“Mr. Goodman,” says Kate. “Get Rich and your lawyer in here. Please.”

Robbie Goodman wavers. Then he hits a button on his wristwatch— _oh, hey, does he have an Apple watch? That’s super intense_. He doesn’t say anything more, which is good. Darcy’s not certain she’ll be able to keep herself from punching him if he keeps effusing like an idiot all over the place, and Kate’s clenching and unclenching her fists in a rhythm like a heartbeat.

Robbie Goodman looks exactly like his pictures. Rich Goodman, on the other hand, is almost enhanced in person. It’s like being caught on film erases something about him, something prowling and dark, like honey laced with arsenic. He smiles at Kate when he comes in, and the lawyer at his shoulder—at least, Darcy presumes he’s a lawyer; he dresses like one—pushes his glasses up his nose. “Why, if it isn’t Katie! What a place to run into you.”

Kate clenches her fists so tight that Darcy can hear her fingers protesting. Darcy shoves her hand out again, to the lawyer, not to Rich Goodman. “Darcy Lewis,” she says. “I assume you’re the attorney for the Messrs. Goodman, here.”

“I represent an interested party, yes,” says the man in glasses, and shakes her hand. He looks…the only word she can come up with is _efficient_ , all sharp lines and fresh creases. “You wouldn’t happen to be a part of Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis, now would you?”

Darcy blinks. Then she blinks again. “I very much doubt you’ve heard of us.”

The man in glasses smiles at her. He’s attractive, but more along the lines of a hollow statue than an actual person. His eyes, though—his eyes are flat, and the way he looks at her makes her think that he’s sizing her up, the way a shark does before it eats something. “I had the pleasure of meeting your partners recently. This is an…interesting coincidence.”

 _Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est_ , she thinks. The chorus circles around her head, a constant refrain. _Run, run, run, run, run, run, run away._

“Yeah,” Darcy says finally. “I’ll say. Small world, huh?”

The man in glasses smiles again, and holds onto her hand for a good three seconds more before releasing it. Darcy has to fight the urge to wipe it clean on her skirt.

“I’ll be brief,” Darcy says, turning away from the psycho in glasses and facing the Goodmans again. Rich Goodman is leaning against the back of the nearest couch, his lips quirked as if this is all fucking hilarious. “In the next three days we intend to file a civil suit against your son, Mr. Goodman, seeking compensation for the fact that he assaulted and raped my client, Katherine Elinor Bishop, on the first of September of this year. We will also,” she says, speaking more loudly, since Robbie Goodman seems ready to interrupt her, “be pursuing a case against the police department, and, one assumes, all relevant parties on either side for their gross misconduct in regard to my client’s assault and its aftermath.” She angles a look at Psycho Glasses Killer at this, and he just smiles “The _only_ reason we’re here today, despite my own instincts and my client’s best interests, is to give you the chance, Mr. Goodman, to do the right thing. You have forty-eight hours to turn yourself into the police. Otherwise, we will bring so much shit down on your head that you’ll be cleaning it out of your ears for the rest of your life. Is that clear?”

The silence hangs in the air, taut. Then Rich scoffs. “You have to be fucking kidding me.” He looks at Kate. “This is the sort of shit you pull? What the fuck, Callum.”

“My name,” says Kate, “is Kate.”

“Whatever the fuck your name is, this is slander, and you and your whore lawyer can fucking try.”

“Hey,” says Darcy. “Be nice.”

“Now, Richard, they do have the right to make allegations if they wish.” Psycho Glasses Killer folds his hands neatly in front of him, like a choir boy would. “May I ask what sort of proof you have, Miss Lewis?”

“You’ll just have to see it in court, I suppose.” Darcy heaves her bag up higher over her shoulder. “So. Your secretary has my card, Mr. Goodman. We’ll be seeing you around. Kate, you ready?”

Kate nods once, and gets to her feet. Her high heels give her three inches on Richard Goodman, and for a split second, she looks like a Valkyrie, like an avenging angel. Then the shadows fade from her face, and she’s just Kate again, hard-eyed and thin-lipped and suddenly very, very tired.

“Kate,” says Rich, but she just turns her back on him. Darcy can see her fingers trembling. _Yup. Time to go._ She’s pretty sure that three minutes will top Matt and Foggy’s interview with Karen’s arresting officers. They had to have had at least ten.

There’s a chime, and a high-pitched voice—“ _matte, matte kudasai_ ”—before a door at the back of the room opens. Through the crack, she can see a trio of Asian men, silent and staring. One of them, a little shorter than the other two, with sharp cheekbones and hard eyes, clears his throat. Robbie Goodman freezes.

“ _Doushimashitaka_?” Next to Darcy, Kate goes stock still. She tips her head a little, as if she’s listening hard. The man stares at Darcy for a moment, and then looks, not to Goodman like she thinks he will, but to the Psycho Glasses Killer. “ _Jikan ga nai. Yotei wa daremo matteimasen._ ”

“ _Nandemonaissu yo, Nobu-san._ ” The dip in pitch in Psycho Glasses Killer’s voice makes Darcy jump. “ _Gofun gurai matte kudasaimasenka? Kanojotachi wa mou owarimashitanode_.”

The Japanese man—Nobu? _Hironobu Orihara_?—studies the five of them for a long moment. Then he inclines his head once to the man in glasses, and leaves the room. The door shuts behind him with a click, and Goodman relaxes with an audible _whoosh_ of air. Rich Goodman looks unsettled. The man in glasses, though; he’s cool as a cucumber. Darcy clears her throat— _because that totally wasn’t sketchy_ —and hooks her arm through Kate’s. “We should go,” she says. “We have other meetings to attend to.”

“And there’s no way we can clear up this misunderstanding?” asks Robbie Goodman, still a bit white around the mouth. “Kate.”

Kate takes off her sunglasses, and folds them deliberately into her pocket. Her eyes are like obsidian. “Oh, Robbie,” she says, and her curving, vicious smile is a thing of beauty. “Go fuck yourself.”

Robbie Goodman has absolutely nothing to say.

.

.

.

9:21 PM  
Okay, if I don’t ask, it’s gonna drive me crazy. Who is this?

1:34 AM  
_How did you get this number?_

1:35 AM  
Deal with the devil.

1:38 AM  
…don’t tell him I texted you, he’ll be mad.

1:39 AM  
_Who are you?_

1:41 AM  
Darcy.

1:41 AM  


1:42 AM  
Who are you?

1:42 AM  
_Claire_.

1:43 AM  
_And I’m not taking a picture, sorry._

1:43 AM  
Psh, it’s fine. Don’t blame you.

1:44 AM  
That one’s from law school, not a right-now selfie, but whatever, contacts ftw.

1:44 AM  
I have gold streaks now! And a stud. It looks awesome.

1:45 AM  
(Hi, my name is Darcy and I babble when I’m nervous.)

1:45 AM  
Main question, though: have you seen our mutual friend tonight? Because he was supposed to meet me two hours ago and he hasn’t shown up.

1:46 AM  
_He left around twenty minutes ago. Should be okay, if he hasn’t managed to get himself stabbed again._

1:47 AM  
Well, that explains how you two met.

1:48 AM  
_Seriously, who the hell are you and how did you get this number?_

1:48 AM  
You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

1:49 AM  
_Try me, because I have had one hell of a night._

.

.

.

The cold concrete of the alleyway tastes like stone and piss against her mouth. Darcy tries to scream—she tries, she knows she does—but her voice is gone. The iron pipe comes down once, again, and she feels her bones breaking, she _feels_ it the same way she feels her nose bleeding, the same way she feels the knife, and _oh, god, I’m dying, I’m dying_ —

The knock on her window sends her flailing out of bed and onto the floor with a muffled shriek, her sheets tangled around her legs. Darcy whacks at her bedside table—for her glasses or for the aluminum baseball bat she’s taken to leaning against her bed at night, she’s not sure—and nearly shrieks again when she sees the dark figure crouching outside on her fire escape. Then she recognizes the mask, and crams her glasses onto her face. “You asshole,” she snaps, and yanks her window open. He rocks back onto his heels, and tips his head as if she’s surprised him. “Do you have a fucking watch? You said _midnight_ , you supremely idiotic asshat. I thought you’d ditched. Hell, I thought you’d _died_.”

“Something happened.” His voice is hoarser than she remembers, and she realizes that the dark smear against his cheek isn’t a bruise, but blood. Fresh, barely dried, still vivid red against his skin, and _fuck._

“Jesus Christ.” Darcy heaves herself out onto the fire escape. “It’s _three o’clock in the morning_. I thought you were dead. I thought someone had killed you and thrown you in a _dumpster_.”

His mouth quirks a little at that, but only for a second. Darcy only takes a second or two to think about how fucking crazy her life has become—in a very expensive corporate office with rapists and yakuza gangsters in the morning, on a fire escape with the devil of Hell’s Kitchen past midnight—before she shakes her head and leans against the railings. “I bet my day has been worse than your day.”

“Russian mobsters kidnapped and tortured a woman trying to draw me out,” says the devil flatly, and her heart drops down into her guts. “What about you?”

“Holy shit.” _One hell of a night? Jesus, Claire._ Her fingers itch for her burner phone.“Is she okay?”

“No.” There’s a bite to his voice that reminds her of someone, for some reason. “She’s not. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay.” Darcy raises her hands. “Okay. We won’t. Somehow I don’t think you’re in the mood to talk about, you know, legal shit.”

The devil doesn’t say anything. He just crouches like some sort of awkward vulture, watching her as if he thinks she’s going to bolt. Darcy stares back at the mask—it’s too dark for her to make out anything else—and then leans her head against the bars. “If that happened, why are you even here right now? Shouldn’t you be keeping an eye on your friend?”

“She’s fine, for the moment. Somewhere safe.” His mouth twists again, like he’s remembering something nasty. “I came to tell you that you need to get rid of your phone.”

“What?”

“Throw the phone away.” The devil puts his hands on his knees, still watching her. “Get rid of it. Forget this happened. It was a mistake, and now I’m correcting it. Forget everything I told you about Goodman. You need to stay as far away from this as possible.”

Her heart skips, stumbles, and falls hard in gravel. Then it gets up and starts doing wind sprints. Darcy’s palms are sweating again. “Because you think someone’s going to come after me, too?”

“Because I can’t afford to have two people hurt because of me.”

Darcy rolls that over in her mind for a moment. Then she gets up onto her knees, reaches forward, and shoves the devil hard in the chest. He hits the fire escape with a clang, just barely catching himself on the railing before he falls, and his lips part. He stares at her. “I,” says Darcy, “have had it up to fucking _here_ with this bullshit.”

“D—Lewis—”

“It is _my fucking choice._ You didn’t drag me into this shit. _I_ asked _you_. _You_ don’t get to decide when I’m done with this, _I_ do.”

The devil doesn’t speak. His mouth opens, and then closes again.

“Do you _think_ ,” Darcy hisses, “that I haven’t _thought_ about shit like this? In, what, the _two weeks_ since you _saved me_ from being murdered in an alleyway? _Oh, I asked the devil of Hell’s Kitchen to help me take down the Goodmans, bet nothing bad will ever come of this_! Guess what? Even _without_ you I’d be going against Goodman, because Goodman had me _attacked_ , because Goodman is an _asshole_ , because his son is a _rapist_ and putting him away is my _fucking job_. I am _not_ ,” she says, and punches him hard in the leg, because it’s the closest part of him she can reach, “going to _fucking run away from this_. And don’t you _dare_ tell me I should, because _you’re wrong_. Do you fucking hear me? I’m _not running away._ ” Her voice cracks. “I’m _not_.”

Darcy’s chest is heaving, her eyes burning; there’s acid in her throat and fury in her fists, and vigilante or not she’s going to pound the shit out of him if he says anything like that again. Smart or not, stupid or not, she’s not a coward. She’s _not_ weak and she’s _not_ vulnerable and she’s _not_ going to tuck her tail between her legs and keep her mouth shut, because she has _done_ that, and she’s _never doing it again_. She bites her tongue so hard that it bleeds. Then she swallows it back. “I am sorry that your friend was hurt.” Darcy digs her nails hard into her palms. “It must have been terrible, and I’m not denying that. But I’m sure that it was her choice to help you, the same way it was mine. And if you try to make her decisions for her because _you’re_ scared, then I guarantee you, she will _tear you a new asshole._ ”

They stare at each other. Then the devil sits up, slowly, his hand never leaving the railing. “Where,” he says, sounding like he’s caught between wonder and despair, “did you even _come_ from?”

“Georgia,” Darcy snaps. “So don’t you even start this shit with me, buddy, because I can dish it out worse than any Russian mobster you’ve ever seen.”

They sit there until Darcy can catch her breath, until she’s crept away from the edge of tears and is just lurking on the verge of hysteria instead. The devil sits next to her, close enough to touch but far enough away that he’s almost a dream, his face turned towards the front of the alley as if he’s waiting for someone to come for them. In Darcy’s room, Darla noses her way up onto the blankets and curls into a tight ball against the pillow, her fur stained yellow by the shoddy street lamp. Five minutes must go by, ten maybe, by the time Darcy finally clears her throat and says, “Is she going to be okay? Your friend.”

He shrugs once, and says nothing.

“Does she need somewhere to go?”

“She’s not coming here.” He doesn’t look at her. “Putting the pair of you in the same place would be ridiculously dangerous. They’d kill you both.”

“I’m not saying that.” Darcy bites her thumbnail. “Only—I have a friend who has a lot of empty houses, all up and down the coast. Your friend—she could stay at one of those for a while, if she needs to get away. Oppie owes me a favor, no questions asked. It might help.”

The devil’s quiet for a moment. “I’ll ask her.”

Darcy lets out a breath, and says, “Okay.”

Silence hangs between them again for a moment.

“Do you know a man named Wilson Fisk?” the devil asks abruptly. Darcy blinks.

“No. Should I?”

“He’s come up a few times.” He knocks his fist lightly against the railing of her fire escape. “A man on trial for murder mentioned his name. Seems like the Russians are working for him too. The ones who took Cl—my friend. They were his men. But he’s not anywhere I can find. Not on the internet, not in any sort of registry. I’ve looked.”

“You think he’s the one that had your friend hurt?”

“I don’t know. But I’m interested. Whoever he is, he has his fingers in a lot of pies, all across Hell’s Kitchen. It’s….” He gropes for a word. “Unsettling.”

“You think he’s in bed with the yakuza, too?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t heard anything like that. It’s possible, but it seems unlikely.” He tips his head at her. “Tell me what happened with Goodman.”

Darcy does. She speaks in short, clipped sentences: the meeting, the people there, the sudden appearance of a man called _Nobu-san_. She mentions Psycho Glasses Killer, too, and the devil stiffens, but says nothing. _They must know each other._ She talks about how Kate had shattered in the taxi on the way to the _Bulletin_ , gone from stiff and still to screaming and sobbing and pounding her fists into her forehead, rocking with the force of her own agony. It had taken four hours before Darcy had even begun to feel comfortable leaving Kate alone, and even then it was only once she’d dropped Kate off at her apartment (and into the capable hands of her housekeeper, Yoko) that Darcy had finally been okay with letting Kate Bishop out of her sight.

“I’ve never seen anybody break like that.” Darcy pulls her knees up against her chest, holding on with both arms. “I worked at a counseling center for victims of abuse, you know? Sexual, physical, psychological. I’ve seen some really bad shit, anxiety wise. Panic attacks, flashbacks, nightmares. Night terrors,” she adds, and rubs the bruise welling up on her wrist. “But nothing like what happened to Kate today. It’s like—it’s like she was only holding herself together by a thread. I don’t know what’s going to happen to her if we don’t win this case. I’m afraid of what she’ll do.”

 _Put an arrow in Rich Goodman’s fucking eye socket_ , she thinks, and the thought makes her stomach churn. The vicious part of her, the part buried just under the skin, curls into a ball like Darla has, and hisses, _yes_.

“I’m scared of what _I’ll_ do if we fail,” Darcy says, and she has no idea why she’s telling him this, this man that she doesn’t know, but she is. She thinks she sees something in the devil that she recognizes, some streak of fury, some deep-seated vein of rage that is so embedded into the core of him that he can’t tell it apart from his own soul. “I bought a gun today. To protect myself. But now I wonder—what if we fail, and I see the gun, and I try to take the law into my own hands? What happens then?”

The devil shifts on the fire escape. Then he reaches out with one hand, and touches his fingertips to her shoulder. It’s barely a brush of glove-on-skin, but it raises goosebumps on her arms. Darcy watches him as he draws his hand away, his mouth curling as if he’s angry at her. Or at himself. “That part isn’t your job, Darcy. It’s mine.”

Darcy stares at him for a long time. She wants to tell him it could be her job, too. But tonight isn’t the night for that; there might not ever be a night for that, not with the way her guts are twisting themselves into knots, tighter and closer and more and more painful until she can’t tell start from end.  _Fear?_ Maybe. Or something else. 

“Tell me what I need to do,” says the devil. “Give me something to do. What is it you need for this case? Who do you need to testify?”

“Something to do, huh.” He looks like he’s going to beat the hell out of someone. _Oh, if only I could just throw him in a room with Richard Goodman. It’d be so goddamn satisfying._ She tugs a strand of hair in front of her eyes, and starts to braid it. “The cops have been messing up; they keep losing shit, misplacing evidence, not calling me back. The arresting officer for the case, Brigid O’Reilly—she’s either been stonewalling me or someone’s been intervening, because I’ve been trying for a week and a half and still haven’t heard a goddamn word from her. I don’t know if she’s in on it or not. And there were two other guys with Goodman when he attacked Kate, Clark Jenson and Matthias Lynch—they witnessed the whole thing. If we can get them to talk, we might be able to do something for a criminal case. But with all the evidence disappearing, there’s not much I can do to bring it to trial.”

“So you need evidence and you need witnesses.”

“Yeah.” Darcy blows her bangs out of her face. “I think they’ll be scrambling a little after seeing us today, which is good, because then we can watch what we do and start cherry-picking what we need, but—where are you going?”

“To get some answers.” He looks down at her, and then holds out his hands. Darcy takes them, and heaves herself to her feet. He steps back before she can do something stupid, like touch him. “I’ll call you when I have something.”

“Wait.” It’s with a sense of extreme déjà vu that Darcy watches him turn on the balls of his feet, glancing at her over his shoulder. “I can’t just—I can’t just keep calling you devil, in my head. And if someone finds the phone, you know, initials are kind of sketchy. I guess—what do I call you?”

The devil thinks for a long time. “Mike,” he says. “You can call me Mike.”

“Mike,” Darcy repeats, and nods. “Okay. Mike.” _And Claire_ , she adds, silently, thinking of her burner phone buzzing on her bedside table. _Mike and Claire._ But that’s a secret, for now. “Don’t—I need them alive.” She bares her teeth. “Up to you whether or not you want their faces in good shape, though.”

The devil—Mike—nods once, and steps off her fire escape into the dark. Darcy watches the moon for a long, long time before she crawls back through her window, around Darla, and into bed.

.

.

.

5:21 AM  
Heard. You need anything?

5:22 AM  
_Other than a hell of a lot of whiskey and a new place to live? Not really._

5:23 AM  
One of those I have in good supply. The other I might be able to manage.

5:23 AM  
The good supply is the whiskey, by the way. I have a friend who lives over a liquor store. It’s kind of awesome.

5:28 AM  
_Seriously, I don’t have the energy to dance around shit right now. What do you want?_

5:34 AM  
Look

5:34 AM  
I’m not a superhero, or a vigilante, or anybody important, really

5:34 AM  
But at the same time that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to do something when shit like this happens

5:35 AM  
This is coming out all garbled because it’s dawn and I haven’t slept yet

5:35 AM  
Well, for more than an hour anyway, but

5:35 AM  
You need help, and I might be able to give it

5:35 AM  
I would understand if you don’t trust me and if you don’t believe me, but I have no motive other than that

5:36 AM  
And today has just been really fucking terrible, in a lot of different ways, and at the end of it I guess I’m just really sick of people being shit on when all they’ve tried to do is the right thing

5:37 AM  
That’s all.

5:45 AM  
Claire?

.

.

.

The phone rings.

“Hello?”

“It had better be good whiskey,” says Claire. Her voice is husky in a way that sounds more natural than anything. Still, it cracks on the last word, like she’s holding back tears. “Because the guy I’m staying with only has some really superbly shitty beer, and I need to get wasted.”

In spite of herself, Darcy laughs. To her horror, it comes out more like sobs.

.

.

.

The phone rings.

“Hello?”

“I’m sorry for calling you at such a time, sir. I know that it’s late.”

“There’s no need to apologize. I asked that you call when you have more information, and you have. Besides, I find myself—unable to sleep, tonight.”

“I appreciate your understanding. Still, I should have waited until tomorrow.”

“What have you found?”

“It seems that I’ve made a tactical error in judging Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis to be a firm easily manipulated. Nelson seems to be remaining harmless, content to keep his nose clean, and Murdock—he’s aggressive, unfortunately, but there’s little else you can expect for a blind man with a grudge against the seeing world. The woman, though—the woman troubles me.”

“How so?”

“I’ve told you that she’s been pursuing a case against Richard Goodman, which, to be frank, I have no problem with. The man is grotesque, and ought to be eliminated. If Darcy Lewis had been content with taking him out, we would have been able to continue with the plan without much more than a stumble. It seems, however, that she’s been—poking her nose into matters better left alone.”

Silence for a moment. “Clarify.”

“Among other things? She’s been asking after O’Reilly’s transfer to the 34th Precinct. I told you that she encountered our friend Mr. Nobu during the course of the legal meeting this morning?”

“You said there was nothing to worry about.”

“And at first I didn’t think there was, but upon reviewing the surveillance footage of the incident, it seems that Lewis…reacted to his presence in a way that cannot be merely explained by confusion. Her eyes widened, her posture changed. It’s possible that she may know more about the background of Goodman-Okamura than previously anticipated.”

“…I see. Can she be removed?”

“She indicated that she would be visiting a reporter from the _Bulletin_ later that day. My sources haven’t yet confirmed whether or not the meeting took place, but it would be inadvisable to take her out so conspicuously, especially since she seems to have forged some sort of bond with Katherine Bishop.”

“It was terrible, what happened to Miss Bishop. The Goodmans are becoming less of a necessary evil and more of a stain upon the character of the organization. It’s unfortunate that they have linked themselves so firmly to Nobu’s fortunes and ventures in the city.”

“I’ll look into it, sir.”

“I would appreciate that. What about Darcy Lewis?”

“I’m investigating her further. I should hopefully have a handful of proposals on how to deal with her by late this afternoon.”

“Thank you, Wesley. And the Russian?”

“His body has been placed. It’s only a matter of time until it’s found. Is there anything else I can do for you tonight, sir?”

“No. But thank you. I’ll speak to you in the morning.”

“You are very much welcome, sir. Have a good night.”

“You, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so constantly overwhelmed by the support I've had for this fic. I'm not even joking. You guys are amazing, and bring me smiles every day. 
> 
> With this chapter, we are through with _In The Blood_ and a little bit into _World On FIre_. RIP Anatoly. Gideon Emery, you will be missed, even if your Russian accent is apparently weird as fuck. (ALSO HI CLAIRE MY BAE HI WESLEY YOU CAME OUT OF NOWHERE AND I LOVE YOU YOU SLIMY SCHEMING BASTARD.)
> 
> Darcy is holding together remarkably well all things considered, but, you know. All good things.
> 
> Japanese translations:  
> "Wait! Wait, please--"  
> "What's the problem? We don't have any time. The plan waits for no one."  
> "It's nothing, Mr. Nobu. Would you mind waiting about five minutes? These women have already finished, so..."
> 
> Any errors in the Japanese are mine, since it's been a long-ass time since I've had a chance to really practice.
> 
> Music mixlist:  
> Wrong Girl // Jane's Addiction  
> The Devil Takes Care Of His Own // Band of Skulls  
> Panic Station // Muse  
> Fight Like A Girl // Emilie Autumn  
> Up In The Air // Thirty Seconds To Mars  
> Here Comes The Reign // Les Friction  
> Map of the Problematique // Muse  
> Destroya // My Chemical Romance  
> Song 2 // Blur  
> Not Your Fault // AWOLnation  
> War Sweater // Wakey!Wakey!  
> Sunday, Bloody Sunday // Paramore


	6. Flashbang

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: discussion of healing wounds, canonical execution (poor sad nameless [?] Russian dude), discussion of alcohol, discussion of victim blaming, discussion of rape, discussion of police brutality/corruption, references to the #blacklivesmatter movement (though I don't think this is a trigger aside from talking about, you know, police brutality/corruption/racism in America), and discussion of explosions/wounds and damage caused by explosions. 
> 
> Once again, unbeta'ed. I've read through this chap like...six times, but there are probably still errors. I'll find them once it's posted, because that's how life works. 
> 
> AWESOME NEWS AT THE BOTTOM CHECK IT OUT GUYS.

The hospital calls her just as she’s heading out to the office the next morning. Darcy hasn’t slept; she’d spent the dawn curled up on the fire escape and talking with Claire (“Claire Temple,” Claire tells her sleepily, because by the time it had hit seven o’clock her voice had started to slur with exhaustion. “Don’t tell him I told you.”) so she’s nursing her fourth coffee in three hours and hating the way her head is pounding. She can’t be blamed for treating the nurse like Satan coming for her soul.

“Look, lady,” she snaps, whacking the office door open with her hip and dumping her shit on Karen’s empty desk. “I get that it’s a lot of money, to, you know, stitch my arm up while I was wounded in the defense of truth, justice, and the American way, but _I don’t have health insurance_. I have told you this like…five million times already.”

“Your sister doesn’t have health insurance?”

“I’ve been an emancipated minor since I was sixteen and never needed it, so no, I’m not on her insurance.” Matt pokes his head out of their shared office, eyebrows lifting behind his round hipster glasses. She knocks her knuckles twice against Karen’s desk to let him know she’s seen him, and then adds, “And no, _I do not have twenty-five hundred dollars just lying around._ Seriously, you said something about a payment plan earlier, can you just—email me the details or something? I’m at work.”

“Of course, Miss Lewis,” says the nurse, in the sort of voice that actually means _stick your head up your own ass and die._ Darcy’s worked in food service. She knows these things. “What address should I use?”

Darcy makes an obscene gesture at the air. “The one I gave you earlier, the banana phone one. That is in my file. Like my phone number is.”

“Right,” says the nurse, and then hangs up on her. Darcy screeches between clenched teeth, kicks the desk, and then drops down hard into Karen’s chair, pinching the bridge of her nose. Matt emerges from the office, looking scruffy and uncomfortable.

“You okay?”

“I hate hospitals.” Darcy rests her cheek against the desk, and looks at him. “Matt, I _hate_ hospitals. So much. Why did Goodman have to hire guys to beat me up? Why couldn’t he have just sent a strongly worded letter? _Dear Darcy, please drop the case with Kate Bishop or we will have to give you a bad paper cut. You will suffer. It will be glorious._ ”

He smirks at her a little. “Be sure to let them know, the next time you stick your nose into a rapist’s business.”

“You _suck_.” She flips him off. “I’m flipping you off.”

“Thought you might be.” Matt leans against the edge of Karen’s desk, and Darcy rolls the chair over until she can set her forehead against his knee. He jumps a little, and then drops a hand to her hair, resting it lightly against the back of her head, as if he’s scared to. “You know,” he says, after Darcy lets out a heavy sigh and squeezes her eyes shut, “if you need help with the bill, you can say so. The firm might not have a lot right now, but I could spot you until you figure out a way to get the cash. It’s not a bad thing.”

“It’s like…” Darcy huffs. “I can pay it, eventually. I just need a plan. I can’t do it all at once. Thanks for the offer, though. I’ll keep it in mind, okay?”

“Yeah.”

His pants are creasing against her cheek. Darcy lifts her head, and tucks her hair behind her ears. “You’re here early. Bad night?”

“Didn’t sleep much.” His bruises finally look better, though. Darcy heaves herself up out of Karen’s chair, and collects her travel cup. “What about you?”

“I had like…hella nightmares, for some reason.” _For some reason, she says. Like you don’t know exactly why you were having nightmares._ “I’m fine, though. I’ll just crash in the afternoon or something, when all of our clients miraculously melt into the ether.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Oh, hey.” Matt tips his head at her. “Did you ever find out anything about the guy that hired us to defend John Healy? You know, before he slipped in an alley and brained himself. Psycho Glasses Killer.”

“Not really.” Matt shrugs. “He never gave a name, and, I mean. I don’t even really know what he looks like. Foggy looked into it a little, I think, but never found anything. Why?”

“He cropped up again.” She scoots by him and into their shared office, where her whiteboard of glory awaits. Matt trails after her like a puppy, hands in his pockets, the top two buttons of his shirt undone for once. “He was in the meeting I had with the Goodmans yesterday, with Kate. I think he’s representing them or something.”

“If he was an attorney he wouldn’t have had to hire us for Healy, he could have just represented him himself.”

“But think of the awesome speeches you guys made! He never would have topped those.” Out comes her lanyard, covered with all of her keys and keychains and the thumb drive she never lets out of her sight. Darcy sets Fred the iPod in his place of honor on the keyboard (she needs to replace him, but she’s too attached to let go), and then sighs. “I don’t know. He didn’t introduce himself, but. I mean. He knows Goodman, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find out his name, if I try. He just…gives me a weird feeling, I guess. He’s kinda the type to keep the bodies of his victims in the freezer to later carve up and consume at his leisure.” She drops her travel mug. “Shit, fuck—no, not my papers—”

Matt collects napkins from the top of his desk (probably from his Thai place obsession) and offers them in her general direction. Darcy pats at the coffee spill, and wants to cry when she sees how her nice new notebook is now all brown and wet and gross. “Karen bought equipment for the office, we can probably print new stuff. If it stops making weird noises, anyway.”

“She bought aliens, not office supplies.” So much for her paper notes. It’s a good thing Darcy transcribes everything into her computer. She dumps it all in the trash. “I’m glad she was there yesterday, when the meeting with the Goodmans ended. I’m pretty sure it would have been way worse if she hadn’t been there. You know, with Kate.”

“She said it was pretty bad,” Matt says carefully. “With Kate.”

Darcy gives him a shrewd look. “So she lectured you about my choices too, huh?”

“I don’t know if you’d call it a lecture. More of a rant.” He runs a hand over his jaw. “Actually, the best way to describe it would be ‘extended snarling.’”

“So if Hurricane Foggy is a ten, Karen grumbling would be—?”

“Four. Possibly a six, if dropping the box of spare photocopier parts was intentional. I don’t think it was, though.”

Darcy swears under her breath. 

“We would have come with you.” Matt leans against the front of his desk, arms crossed over his chest. “If you’d asked. You didn’t have to go alone.”

“I wasn’t alone. Kate was there.”

“Kate’s a client, Darcy. It’s your job to protect her, not the other way around.”

She opens her mouth to argue, and then closes it again, because technically, he’s right.

“Granted, I probably would have done the same thing,” he adds. “But according to Foggy, I’m not the best role model in the world.”

“Foggy’s just jealous he doesn’t get to use that pouty face on unsuspecting old ladies.”

Matt smiles a little, and takes a sip of his coffee.

“I don’t know, though.” There’s only two gulps of coffee left in her travel mug, now. She finishes it off, and then sets it to the side so she doesn’t spill coffee _three_ times in a twenty-four hour period. Even dregs are suspect at this point. “The guy with the glasses seemed super interested in the firm, so it’s probably a good thing you guys weren’t there. Now all three of us are on his radar, but if you or Foggy or Karen had come along it would have been, like, doubled on you guys. I dunno. At least this way it was just, you know. Me.”

 “I’m about eighty percent sure that radar doesn’t actually work that way.”

“Oh, bite me, Murdock.” She gives her notebook up for a lost cause, and dumps it in the trash, too. Back to the dollar store for her. “I don’t like how we keep running into this guy. It’s like he’s watching us, or something. It’s creepy.”

Matt makes another thoughtful noise. Darcy sighs, and then crosses the space between their desks (maybe three steps, because this room is fucking tiny) to boost herself up into the space between his braille reader and his modified laptop. She knocks her knee against his elbow. Matt nudges her back.

“At least the room smells like coffee, now, instead of nicotine. This is a plus.”

“Darcy.” She cocks her head at him, and then touches his elbow again to let him know she’s listening. “Promise you won’t meet with the Goodmans again without one of us coming with you.”

“I’m not taking Karen into a room with that guy.” She’s been very careful not to mention to anyone how almost all of Robbie Goodman’s female employees are tall, leggy blondes. Karen would be a very bad addition to this mix.

“No, not Karen. Psycho Glasses Killer—” his lips twitch, seemingly in spite of themselves “—singled her out the last time he was here. If he has anything to do with Union Allied—” Darcy makes a disbelieving noise “—I’m not saying he _does_ , just that if he is, then Karen needs to be kept out of the way.”

Karen won’t like that. Darcy grunts noncommittally, and decides to talk about it with her when neither Matt nor Foggy are in the room to interfere. “Well, I’m not taking Foggy, because he’ll freak out. He doesn’t do well with big offices and skyscraper views. I think it’s because he’s afraid of heights.” Darcy knocks his elbow a third time. “Which leaves you, punky. Tell me that’s not what you were planning in the first place.”

“Hey.” Matt spreads his hands, as if to say, _Who, me?_ “What would I be able to do? I’m harmless.”

“See, you say that, but you forget that I was reigning champion of the Nelson-Lewis Tickle Wars until you invaded from the east and destroyed all our armies. It was very sad. A total massacre.” She sniffs. In the main part of the office, she hears the door open and close, and the click of Foggy’s shoes against the floor. “They put up memorials and everything. You missed all the ceremonies.”

Matt grins at her. “I mean, _I_ wasn’t going to bring it up, but—”

She shoves him in the shoulder, and he rocks back into her hands, still smiling.“Smug asshole.”

“What did Matt do now?” asks Foggy, sticking his head through their open door. “Did he breathe again? You should tell him not to breathe. He exhales misplaced superiority.”

“Well, you’re in a good mood.” Matt scoots until his ribs are flush against her leg, turning his face towards Foggy. She’s not sure if he’s doing it because of his natural Matt-ness (inability to breathe without flirting) or his need for hugs (starting to rival Queen Elsa of Arendelle’s at this point), but she presses her thigh against his side, tipping her head a little so that her hair dangles over his shoulder. “Why so pleased?”

“Uh, other than the fact that it’s a beautiful day, I work with some of my favorite people in the world, and the office now smells like coffee instead of cigarettes?” Foggy looks almost in raptures. “Karen bought a _fax machine_. I am still on the fax machine high.”

Darcy laughs. “You stay on that high, Foggy. That sounds like a good high.”

“You two look cozy.” Foggy waggles his eyebrows, and Darcy throws a paperclip at him. “I’m waggling my eyebrows, Matt. But yeah. What’s with the happy-sad faces so early in the morning?”

“Other than a very long, very difficult day yesterday? I didn’t sleep last night.” Darcy frowns. “Speaking of—Matt, what kept you up until all hours? Don’t tell me it was insomnia again, I caught you sleeping at your desk, like, two days ago.”

“I dunno. I just couldn’t sleep.”

“You,” says Foggy, “are a lying liar who lies. That _bastard—_ ” he points at Matt, as if it’s not obvious “—has a _second phone_ for all his ladies. One of them called him yesterday. He has a _booty phone._ ”

Darcy’s not entirely certain if she should laugh or cry, so she punches Matt in the shoulder instead. “Ow,” says Matt. “That was unnecessary.”

“You have a booty phone and you didn’t tell me, you rat. That was totally necessary.” She swings her legs. “So, last night. Deets. Was it the violent paralegal?”

Matt rolls his eyes behind his glasses, and steps away from her. At the door, Foggy grins. “Ooh, wait, no, it could be that Greek girl, Elphaba-something.”

“Elektra,” Darcy corrects. “Or, oh, it could be—wait, what was that goth girl’s name, the one that wrote her name on him in sharpie and thought he wouldn’t notice—”

“ _Francesca_ ,” says Foggy with unholy glee. “Matt, tell us the truth. Did you get a booty call from _Francesca_ last night?”

“I’m not listening to any of this,” says Matt, and wades through a sea of ignominy to disappear into the staff room. They follow him, because Darcy has yet to let an opportunity for mocking Matt Murdock pass her by, and because Foggy, as usual, is the one who started it.

“What about Martine?” Darcy says, and Matt’s shoulders hitch up near his ears. “Ooh, or _Annabeth_? That bitch still owes me a watch for the one she stole.”

Karen, who’s just nudging her way through the door, blinks. She looks from Matt, who’s standing with shoulders hunched over the coffee press, to Foggy, whose shit-eating grin is a mile wide, to Darcy. Darcy beams at her.

“Karen! Perfect timing. We’re talking about Matt’s love life. How many girls’ names do you know?”

“I helped my cousin name her baby. I think I still remember most of the options. Why?”

“Because I guarantee you I can come up with a story for every name on your list. Foggy, who was that girl in the econ class, the one who hit you up for weed because you had long hair?”

“Oh, Jesus. Stephanie Bartlett? That girl was a _wreck_. Nice boobs, though, which I’m pretty sure was like, ninety percent of the appeal—”

“Oh, it totally was, her boobs were amazing, and I have really high standards, you know this—Jesus, do you remember Cassandra? The one with the nose ring?”

“And the shoplifting problem that nearly had me arrested?”

Darcy chokes. “Holy shit, I forgot about that—”

Karen’s giggling. “What did she _do_?”

“She snuck a bunch of stuff into Foggy’s backpack and when the security guards caught her she flipped out and said Foggy had paid her to do it. And _then—_ ” Darcy strikes a pose “—when the guards went to talk to Foggy she fucking _bolted_. She nearly knocked me over, she ran by so fast.”

“Oh my god, are you serious?” Karen bites her lower lip, smiling wide. “Where is she now? Did she get caught? Is she in jail?”

“Look at it this way,” says Foggy. “When we say that Matt has a bad history with women, _we mean it_.”

“Hilarious,” says Matt sourly, and but his lips are twitching. “You guys aren’t any better.”

“Hey, I only dated _one_ asshole, not a million of them.” Darcy glances at Foggy. “Though to be fair, Foggy-bear here has some good stories too—”

“Uh-uh.” Foggy makes a cross with his fingers. “We don’t talk about that at work.”

“Foggy-bear,” Karen whispers. Her shoulders are shuddering. “ _Foggy-bear._ ”

“Oh, so _my_ love life’s free game, but yours isn’t?” Matt snorts. “Hypocrite.”

“That’s because _your_ love life is hilarious, and mine is just pathetic. You’re like a sexual Rain Man, it’s actually super terrifying.”

“I’m going to go into my office now,” says Matt. “Because I am an adult, and I am going to go and do my job. As an adult.”

“Meaning his booty phone needs organizing,” says Darcy in a loud whisper, and Karen loses it. She laughs until she turns pink, full-on giggle-snorts that are too fucking adorable to actually exist, and so Darcy starts laughing too. Within seconds, they’re all puddles of laughter on the floor, Darcy and Foggy and Karen, and through the open door to their office she can see Matt laughing too.

 _These are my friends,_ she thinks, and she hooks one arm around Foggy’s neck, the other around Karen’s shoulders, squishing them close to her. _Goodman thinks he’s going to touch them? He’s dead wrong._

The gun in her purse lingers like a viper in the back of her mind.

.

.

.

Elena Cardenas is the take-no-nonsense, leave-no-prisoners type of lady that would have fit in well in Darcy’s Babushka’s quilting club. Babushka, Darcy thinks, had absolutely no patience for fools, and judging by the amount of steel in Mrs. Cardenas’ spine, Elena doesn’t either. She’s lost and crying and furious, and she can see the exact moment Matt’s hero complex trips him up and into accepting the case.

Not that Darcy wasn’t going to, if Matt and Foggy said no—they’re partners, but they’d agreed right at the very beginning that cases could be taken on individually as well as firm-wide—but at the same time she still bites her tongue and sighs a little in the back of her throat.

“Don’t you even look at me right now,” she says to Foggy, as soon as the conference room door shuts behind Karen and Mrs. Cardenas, the soft whirl of Spanish fading behind the glass. “I’m not going to be your bodyguard.”

“But you’re scarier than me. It’d be awesome. Your piercings would make them shit their pants.”

“No, Foggy.”

“Darce.” Foggy’s using puppy eyes. _Jesus, Nelson. Who do you think you learned that look from? Not working on me, buddy._ “Come on. They’re gonna eat me. Seriously, look at my deliciousness. Landman and Zack is going to _eat me alive_.”

“You ditched them like six months ago. They can’t possibly remember you well enough to want to eat your flesh and consume your soul.”

Karen, returning from escort duty, stops dead in the doorway. Then she visibly steels herself, and shuts the door behind her. “I’m not even going to ask.”

“Better that you don’t,” Matt says under his breath, and then winces. She’s pretty sure Foggy just kicked him under the table.

“Darcy, seriously. L and Z hold grudges like you’ve never seen. Don’t laugh, it’s not funny. I am legit scared they’re going to drop me in the piranha pit if I cross into their territory.”

“They have a piranha pit?” Darcy asks, and Foggy gives her that look he stole from Jen, the _don’t be an asshole, you think it’s cute but it’s not_ look. Darcy blows him a kiss.

“I’ll go,” says Karen. “I’ve never seen a piranha feeding frenzy before. It’ll be fun.”

Foggy’s ears turn pink. “Laugh it up, fuzzball, you’d miss me if I was dead. You’d no longer have an object at which to cast looks of longing.”

Karen snorts. “Yeah, sure, Foggy. Lemme just go get my stuff.”

Darcy waits until she’s vanished into the staff room before elbowing Foggy in the ribs. “You just called her Chewbacca. Well done.”

“What?” Foggy blinks at her. “Why wouldn’t Chewbacca be a compliment? Chewbacca’s badass.” 

Darcy rolls her eyes. “Matt, mind if I tag along to the precinct? I need to nag Brett about something.”

“Knock yourself out.”

“Awesomesauce.”

Foggy presses a hand to his chest. “Shot through the heart, Lewis. You’re ditching me for a _Catholic_?”

“Sorry, Foggy-bear, but our love can never be. We discovered this at an unfortunate party in undergrad where you tried to do a tequila shot out of my belly button and ended up biting me.”

Matt swallows his coffee wrong, and gags.

The waiting room in the 15th Precinct smells like cigarette smoke and unwashed hair, most likely because of the gaggle of bikers hanging out in the corner, muttering to themselves in a mix of hick and white trash slang. One of them whistles at her, and Darcy flips him the bird before hooking her arm through Matt’s again. Brett gives them a long, level look, and then says, “My entire house smells like a stogie, Murdock. It’s not appreciated.”

Matt shrugs. “I told Foggy not to do it, if it helps.”

“I didn’t,” Darcy says. “I fully encouraged him in the acquisition of said stogies.”

Brett’s eyes drop to her fingernails (she’s painted them black today, in honor of Mike the Devil) and then flick back up to her face. They’d never been able to get along very well, even before the sudden flare of vodka-induced horniness had descended into a three week period of sex-filled insanity. Still, despite his depressing tendency to act as if he has _any right to tell her what to do_ , Brett is good people about 85% of the time. His odd, aggressively anti-climactic friendship with Foggy is proof enough of that.

Brett heaves a breath. “Why does this not surprise me?”

Darcy gives him a wide smile. “Because I love your mother so very, very much?”

“That explains some things.” Brett tucks his pen behind his ear, and folds his hands on the countertop. “Still. She’d be getting them anyway. At least this way I know I won’t be having to book my own mother for purchasing illegal cigars on the street. What can I do for you, Murdock? Lewis?” he adds after a moment, after Darcy flutters her eyelashes at him.

 “Armand Tully.” Matt cocks his head. “What can you tell us about him?”

“What, the developer?” Brett whistles through his teeth. “You do go for broke, the three of you. Union Allied, then, what, this Bishop case Sergeant Oslo won’t get off my back about, and now this?”

“Go big or go home,” says Darcy, but her heart’s jumped up into her throat. “Sergeant Oslo’s been nagging you?”

“Yeah.” Brett gives her half a glance. “Says that some nosey lawyer won’t stop bugging him about one of his new transfers?”

“More like a buxomly gorgeous, highly intelligent, and extremely dedicated attorney is attempting to get into contact with a possible witness and Sergeant Sexist Asshat won’t cooperate.”

“Sounds like Oslo.” Brett clicks his tongue against his teeth. “You have a case?’

“If I get ahold of Brigid O’Reilly then you bet your ass I have a case.”

“I’ll look into it.” He looks back to Matt. “Tully?”

Behind them, the front door to the precinct slams. Darcy glances over her shoulder just in time to see Detectives Blake and Hoffman, clearing coming in from a cigarette break, meandering their way over to the “employees only” door behind the counter. Blake gives her a lingering top-to-toe look, and drops her a huge, gross wink before they vanish into the precinct proper. Darcy suddenly has the urge to take a bath in acid.

Her phone buzzes, and not with one of her customized ringtones, either. Darcy glances up at Matt and Brett through her hair—too involved with Tully-talk to pay attention—and slinks away to answer the burner, plugging her other ear with one of Fred’s music dispensers. “Well, hey there, lady. I thought you’d be asleep for like…days.”

“I’m bored.” A cabinet slams on Claire’s end. At least, she assumes it’s a cabinet. “You’d better be serious about that whiskey, because I can only find some really bad German lager and I think my taste-buds are shriveling just looking at it.”

Darcy snorts. “I’d offer to help, but, y’know, I’m actually at work. And not hiding from mobsters.”

“Damn. Foiled.” A fridge closes, this time. Claire’s quiet for a moment. “I didn’t mean to bug you. I guess—it’s weird, y’know? It’s just been a weird few days.”

“I hear that. How’s your head? Did you take that Ibuprofen?”

“Ibuprofen doesn’t do much for fractured ribs, and _apparently_ —” she sounds disgruntled “—I have one of those. According to Edward X-Ray Hands.”

“Ugh, tell me about it. Fucking pain meds don’t do shit for ribs.” Darcy closes her eyes against the answering bite of pain underneath her shirt. “Wait. Does that mean Mike can see through my clothes? That’s just dirty. I feel like this should be a plotline for a really bad porno.”

Claire pauses. “Mike?”

“Hm? That’s the name he told me to use. But seriously, X-Ray Hands?”

“That’s…probably more something you should talk to him about, rather than me.” She clears her throat. “But yeah. Sorry. I didn’t—I know you work.”

“Honey, please.” Matt and Brett are still hamming it up, and the cat-calling yodelers in Duck Dynasty’s White Trash Band have filtered out into the world at large. Darcy drops down into one of the least smelly chairs, and crosses her legs at the knee. “You needing someone to talk to after having the shit kicked out of you and—you know, everything else—is not something that’s gonna bother me. Even in the middle of the work day.”

Claire laughs. “Makes you better than my mother. I think if I called her in the middle of the work day she’d flay me alive.”

“Awww, I’m better than your mom. You know how to compliment a lady.” The banana phone goes off. Darcy digs through her purse again, swearing under her breath. “But yeah. I’d bring you booze, but, y’know. Secret hideaway. Hush-hush. I think he’d be mad.”

“ _Him_ ,” says Claire. “It sounds like we’re in middle school. _Don’t say his name, ohmigod, he might know_.”

“God, middle school.” It’s a text from Foggy. _MARCI SIGHTING. BURY ME AT DOVER._ “But yeah. Sorry.  The whiskey plots are a bust.”

“Foiled again.”

“We would have gotten away with it, too, if not for those meddling kids.”

“Darcy,” says Matt, turning towards her voice, and Darcy swears under her breath again. On the other end, Claire makes an inquiring noise.

“Sorry, have to go. Persevere. There might be some Jackie D in the back of one of the cabinets.”

“There better be, or I’m going to cry in the corner all day.” Claire hangs up without a goodbye, which is probably for the best because Darcy’s never been good with goodbyes. She leans forward in her chair, and tugs at Matt’s hand until he’s found his way onto the bench next to her.

“Who was that?”

“Hm?” Another text comes in, this time from Karen. ( _So, apparently Foggy’s ex-girlfriend runs the piranha pit.)_ “What’s up with your face? You look like someone took a shit in your cornflakes.”

Matt shifts abruptly from _angry-and-pretending-not-to-be_ to _hurt-and-not-sure-why_ and then finally to _frustrated-but-ignoring-it._ “What do you mean, what’s up with my face?”

“Nothing. Did Brett have bad news?”

“He’s going to get some files.” Matt folds both hands around his guiding cane. Darcy swypes a text to Foggy ( _oh my god are you fucking kidding me TELL ALL_ ) and then to Karen ( _Marci Stahl doesn’t *run* the piranha pit, she *is* the piranha pit_ ) before heaving her bag up into her lap. She needs to stitch a secret pocket for her secret phone for her secret friendship with the secret friend of a vigilante. And also her secret alliance with said vigilante. There are a lot of secrets in her life, suddenly. “You’re chatty. New boyfriend?”

“Not even close.” This time when her phone buzzes, it’s Kate. ( _Meet @ Mug Shots, 3pm? Urich signed on._ ) “Just some girl I’ve met through work. She’s cool.” Darcy grins at him. “We gon’ drank.”

The corners of his mouth lift into an odd little smile. Darcy looks down at her phone again, and then swears. “Okay, so you know how I said I’d help with all the files?”

“Kate?”

“Kate. I have to beg out at two.”

“How dare you,” says Matt lazily, and leans forward to rest his elbows against his knees. “How on earth will I survive without you? I might walk into the street.”

“Not to mention that the files that we’re getting are going to be very much requiring a seeing person?”

Matt snorts. “Yeah, that.”

Darcy clucks her tongue. “I honestly don’t know how any of you survive without me. It’s a mystery. Foggy would forget to shower, Karen would forget to breathe, and you’d forget to eat.”

Matt points at himself, then at her. “Pot. Kettle.” Then he points in a random direction, unfortunately at a woman who looks like a hooker coming in for a probation officer meeting. “Broiler.”

The hooker bristles.

“ _Lo siento_ ,” says Darcy. “ _Mi amigo es un idiota._ Foggy’s a broiler?”

“I was going for me being the broiler, but okay, yeah, Foggy can be the broiler.”

“Why is Foggy a broiler?”

“First thing I could come up with.” His voice still sounds odd, for some reason, like he’s holding himself back from saying something important. Darcy presses one of her earbuds into his hand, and turns on her police station mix, the one with a lot of screaming and angry noises from early 2000s alternative bands. Matt closes his eyes behind his glasses, holding onto his cane with both hands, and they lapse into a comfortable silence.

She feels Matt’s shoulder tense against hers in the moment before a sharp sound cracks through the precinct, and the world goes to shit.

.

.

.

It takes another hour and a half to get out of the insanity that the 15th becomes, because somehow in spite of the fact of them both being attorneys, and Brett _knowing_ that they’re both attorneys, and the fact that the guy who was shot (Russian mobster in an interrogation room with, of all people, Blake and Hoffman) had been seen or heard by exactly neither of them, both Darcy and Matt have to be interviewed about everything before they get to walk out the front doors again. Matt still wavers on his feet from his fall, as if he’s dizzy, and Darcy makes certain he’s in a cab back to the offices before she catches one of her own for Mug Shots. She’s more than halfway there when Kate calls in a dither to say that she’ll be a few minutes late because of her professor dropping a group project meeting on her head at the absolute last second, and so Darcy resigns herself to an hour or so of awkward conversation with a reporter she’s never met while worrying about hospital bills she can’t pay and hoping that Matt won’t fall and break his head open _again_.

According to his employment summary online, Ben Urich is an older black man with salt-and-pepper hair and smile lines around his eyes. In reality, Ben Urich is a spry-looking guy in his late fifties, maybe early sixties, with a sharp downward curve to his mouth and a gaze like freshly-sharpened tacks. She likes the way he shakes her hand—firm double-pump, no nonsense—and the way that his gaze never once dips below her chin, even though she’s wearing one of her too-tight Doctor Who T-shirts underneath her jacket. “Good to meet you, Mr. Urich,” Darcy says, and gives him an actual smile. “Thanks for meeting up with us on such short notice.”

“Kate told me a little about you.” Ben Urich nods, as if she’s gained a seal of approval. “Good kid, Kate. Terrible what happened to her.”

“That’s why we’re here.” Darcy takes the chair opposite his. He picked a good spot—out of the way of the main windows, not immediately visible from the front door. If anybody _is_ watching them (doubtful, but whatever) they won’t be easily found back here. She wonders if Kate talked to him, or if he just picked it by instinct.  “You want a coffee? They have good Columbian roast here.”

“Already ordered.”

“What about scones? They make an awesome scone platter, too, and we have a little time before Kate gets here. School stuff, apparently.” She gives him a considering look. “I lay claim to all lavender scones on this table, though. Just FYI.”

His lips twitch. “Well, in that case.”

“Awesome. Orange peel scones? You look like an orange peel kinda guy. I’mma leave my stuff here while I order, okay?”

“In the hands of a journalist?” He lifts his eyebrows at her. “Trusting.”

“Hey, think of it this way—if anything goes missing, I’ll know who to hunt down and destroy.”

She’s already spent her cab ride here Googling as much as she can about Ben Urich, so instead she uses her wait in line to text Oppie about the possibility of her needing a house sitter. (Oppie’s family is old money, and they have to have six or seven or twelve summer houses across the world; Darcy knows for a fact that at least two of them are just a few hours upstate, and most of them are barely used at all. If Claire could go anywhere and not be found, it’d be there.) Oppie won’t respond to her until after five—it’s her one hard-and-fast rule about work, which is _no cell phones until it’s over_ —but at least it’s done, and if Claire does decide to take Darcy up on it, Darcy’ll have an answer for her sooner rather than later. Karen pings her to let her know that Matt’s dropped off the files and wandered away somewhere, supposedly on a reconnaissance mission, though what he could possibly have to reconnoiter she has no idea.

By the time she’s collected her coffee and her plate of scones (four lavender, two orange peel, two cinnamon-clove because Kate has a thing for spices) and returned to the table, Urich has set himself up in style. An old-fashioned hand-held tape recorder is sitting in the middle of the table, in front of a battered laptop that has to be a good five years old. He also has a notebook open next to him, full of scribblings and stained at the edge with coffee. His eyes get a little big at the sight of her heaping plate of scones, but Darcy shrugs.

“Hospital’s giving me a huge bill for a quick stitch job.” She gives him a saucer she’d borrowed from the return counter, and then offers the plate. “I figured I might as well splurge on sweet, sweet foodstuffs before I have to cut them out of my diet for, like, eternity.”

“Which hospital?”

“Metro-General.” Darcy licks crumbs off her fingers. “Can’t blame ‘em, really. Bureaucracy’s a bitch and I don’t have insurance, so, y’know, they have to take what they can get.”

His eyebrows crease. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, Mr. Urich. I’ll figure something out. It’ll just mean no scones and probably very little expensive coffee for a long time, that’s all.” Darcy yanks her laptop from her bag, along with her lanyard, and sets them both up on the table. Now that her notebook’s hit the dust, her laptop is all she has, notes-wise. “Okay, um, one thing. It’s Kate’s interview, so, y’know. I’m only here for moral support and legal advice. But I do have one rule, which I need you to hear, because it’s incredibly important.”

Ben Urich peers at her from over the top of his computer, and then folds his hands together, and stares. He has a very piercing stare. Darcy has to force herself to keep eye contact. “I know a reporter’s job is to question everything, and I know that if/when you publish the article it has to be filled with _allegedly_ and _according to_ and _no comment_ , but do me a favor? Don’t ask her if she imagined it, or if she misunderstood something, or what she was drinking or what she was wearing. It won’t help either of you, and if I think she’s being made uncomfortable in any way, I reserve the right to hit the brakes.”

Ben’s eyes narrow slightly. “I’m not about to treat her with kid gloves just because she’s a victim.”

“That’s not the point. The point is that she _is_ a victim, so don’t you dare act like it’s her fault. Questions, yes. Blaming, no. Otherwise, the _Bulletin_ will turn into another _Rolling Stone_ UVA scandal with Ben Urich at the helm.” She flashes her finger guns. “Sha-zam.”

Urich stares at her for a long time. “You’re very protective, for an attorney.”

“We take the hands-on approach at Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis.” She eyes him, and then takes a sip of her coffee. “I don’t think we’ll have a problem, though.”

“Oh?” He settles his scone on the saucer, not taking his eyes off her. “Why do you say that?”

“I’ve heard good things from a mutual acquaintance.” The door to Mug Shots opens, and here comes Kate, slinky and deadly-looking in dark sunglasses and jeggings. Darcy waves at her, and she nods once before turning to Barista Bob and starting an argument about the hazelnut creamer. “Besides, you called her a victim earlier, which scored you serious points. Keep it up, Urich, we might keep you on retainer.”

Ben coughs, lips twitching, and begins to dissect his scone.  

The interview lasts only a little more than an hour, and though Kate does get bristly at one point, it’s more about the notion that Ben is getting sidelined at his own paper rather than because of anything Ben asks her, so Darcy counts it as a win. They escort Kate out to a cab together, and she’s actually smiling a little as she crawls into the taxi. For the first time since hearing the story about Kate’s rape, Darcy feels like they might actually have a chance at winning this case. _Public opinion is everything_ , she thinks, watching the cab pull out into traffic. _Without it, we’re screwed._ And as gruff as Ben is, he seems to genuinely like Kate. The fact that he’s here at all says a lot about the sort of person he is.

It’s not a won suit in the bag, but it’s a good thing all the same. Darcy will take it.

“Miss Lewis.” Darcy blinks, and turns. Ben heaves his bag higher up on his shoulder, his eyes needle-sharp behind his glasses. “You said earlier that you’d heard about me through a mutual acquaintance. Who?”

“Hm?” Darcy cocks her head, hooking her headphones around the back of her neck. “I don’t know if you ever met her, actually. A few weeks ago my firm took on Karen Page’s case. We all read your article on Union Allied. You seemed like a straight shooter, no bullshit, no agendas, which is what we need for this. Then Kate said she knew you, and I guess it kind of snowballed from there. Why?”

Something shifts in his face. Ben shakes his head. “Nothing. Doesn’t matter.”

Well, that answers the question of who Karen’s been meeting up with, at least. _Karen, what do you think you’re doing?_

“About your story.” Darcy snaps to attention. Thankfully, Ben doesn’t seem to have noticed her drifting. “Obviously, it won’t be published until I have a little more background, but it should go up sometime in the next three days. When were you planning on filing?”

“I gave them forty-eight hours yesterday. So, beginning of Friday’s work day.” Darcy kicks an empty Sprite bottle. “Maybe this will get the cops’ collective asses in gear in filing criminal charges. I never wanted to go into the DA’s office, because to be entirely honest I didn’t want to spend half my career babysitting DUIs and drug dealers, but I’ve been cursing Kampfer v. Vonderheide and the Court of Appeals with my every breath the past week or so.”

“That’s a feeling you’re going to have to get used to, if you want to survive.” Ben checks his watch. “I need to go check in with my editor and let him know that he has a story that straddles the metro and society pages. He might just cry.”

“And I’m hearing absolutely no bitterness there, Mr. Urich.”

He makes a face. “Ben’s fine. I’ll email you both a copy of the article once it’s written. My cell phone number’s on the card I gave you; if either of you remember anything you want included, have any questions, call me. I’m a night owl.”

“The one who watches the watchmen?” says Darcy, and Ben actually cracks a smile.

“Be safe, Miss Lewis.”

“Darcy,” she corrects, and shakes his hand one last time. Then he slips into his cab. Darcy hitches her bag higher on her shoulder, puts in one of her earbuds (not the other; she’s not stupid, not anymore) and turns to start her long march back to the apartment.

Jen’s not home, and the aluminum bat is right where she left it, beside the front door. Darla curls around her ankles as Darcy kicks off her shoes and drops her bag onto the kitchen table, stalking from room to room with the bat at the ready. When her search comes up empty, she changes into pajamas and turns on Netflix. She can only ever get her work done in a decent amount of time when she has _Arrow_ on in the background, and her squishy Avengers pajama pants on. She discovered this in law school, and she’s not one to break tradition.

At about eight o’clock, she gets an email from Landman and Zack— _hey, figures_ —to let her know that they’ll be happy to have a meeting at her convenience to discuss the possibility of out-of-court settlement for her client, Miss Bishop. It’s not signed _Marci_ , thank fucking god—Marci has always scared the shit out of her—but it’s still intimidating enough that she has to go down to the bodega and buy more Bailey’s before writing a very polite, very flowery, very _go fuck yourselves_ sort of note to say no, her client _won’t_ be accepting settlement, thank you very much, and if they think that they can trap her that easily then they have another thing coming. Jen gets home at nine, swearing in Greek under her breath, and Darla (lounging on Darcy’s lap in a rare show of affection) promptly abandons her to curl up on Jen’s chest. They’re marathoning _Batman Beyond_ when Darcy’s phone rings.

_“Hi ho, hi ho, it’s someone you don’t know; hi ho, hi ho, it’s someone—”_

“I h-hate that ring tone.” Jen presses her pillow over her ears. Her voice comes out muffled. “Yrtbp.”

“Untranslatable. _Ow,_ don’t kick me.” She swipes the phone open. “Hello, this is Darcy speaking.”

 “…hi.” The voice on the other end is tinged with a Queens accent, female and growly from cigarette smoke. Darcy mutes _Batman Beyond_ , watching as on the screen Inque melts into the floor and circles around to hit Terry McGinnis in the back. “I’m sorry for calling you so late. My name’s Brigid O’Reilly; I heard from Sergeant Mahoney that you’ve been trying to get in touch with me?”

Holy shit. _Brett, you utter darling._

“What?”

Had she said that aloud? “Nothing. Yes, this is Darcy Lewis. Hi. I’m—assuming you haven’t been getting any of my messages, I left a bunch with the sergeant at the 34th.”

“No, I didn’t—I just heard about this an hour ago. I’m so sorry, I don’t know what happened. There have been problems with the phone lines at the station, apparently.”

 _Yeah, the kind that involve shredded messages and clipped wires._ Darcy hits the space bar again, for Jen, and then clambers to her feet. The couple upstairs are arguing again, and Ed next door is hosting his weekly drum session of insanity. _Fire escape, then._ “No problem. Do you have time right now, or should I call you back in the morning?”

“No, I just came off shift, I’m free for a while.”  

“Gimme a minute.” She grabs a fresh notebook from the pile under her bed, and then heaves her window open. Her phone chimes again. Karen. She declines it. “Okay. Yeah. Um. I wanted to talk to you about Kate Bishop.”

The silence from the other end of the line speaks volumes. Brigid O’Reilly lets out a deep sigh, just loud enough to cause the connection to static out for a second. “I wondered if it might be that.”

“Did you, now.”

“I’m not completely dense. Sudden transfer to a new precinct after my original arrest report mysteriously goes missing? And then apparently all of your missed calls which somehow ended up in the shredder?” It sounds like O’Reilly’s rolling her eyes. “I might not be a detective, but I did put it together that something was up. I assume you’re looking into her case?”

“We’re filing a civil suit, actually.”

“Yes,” says Brigid O’Reilly. “You don’t have to ask. Yes, I will act as a witness, or make a statement, or whatever you need. Yes.”

“That was quick.”

“I’ve been thinking about it.” O’Reilly sighs again. “Look, everyone at the Central Park Precinct has known that D’Angelo’s bad news, for years. There were always rumors, y’know, that he was on the take, but we couldn’t ever confirm it. Most of the _old boys—_ ” her voice turns abruptly venomous “—were content to let it lie, because—well, I’m sure you know the culture.”

“Yeah.” _And why aren’t you mired in it?_ “Which is what makes this, y’know, a little confusing for me. I know what cops are like. Hell, the whole world knows what American cops have been like, these past few years.”

“I didn’t turn my back on the Mayor,” says O’Reilly. There’s a flick of a lighter on the other end, and then a rush of air. “Caught a lot of shit for it, but I didn’t. There are times for insubordination and disrespect, same as there’re times for anything, but right now, with this case, with those boys, with everything that’s happening—this isn’t one of those times. I’ve been working in the system for almost two decades, girly-girl, and I know it better than you ever will, peering in from the outside. There are good men and women on the force, same as there are anywhere, but right now they’re outnumbered by the psychos and the asshats and the goddamn vigilantes. So yeah. If you’re asking me to sign on to help weed out the corruption in the organization I’ve devoted fifteen years of my life to, damn fucking straight I’m saying yes. I’ll sign whatever papers you need me to, go to whatever hearings you need, whatever.”

There’s something entrancing about Brigid O’Reilly’s voice, the steady determination of it, the barely-leashed anger. It reminds her, almost, of Mike. “Even meet with a reporter?”

O’Reilly makes a noise like she’s grinding her teeth. “Fine, yes. Even a reporter. Just no asshats.”

“Ben Urich?”

“Better than a punch in the tit,” says O’Reilly, and Darcy laughs.

“I’ll tell him you said that, I think it’ll make him laugh.”

“Fine, whatever. Just—do me a favor, all right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Tell the kid I’m sorry,” says O’Reilly. “Kate, I mean. Tell her I’m sorry it had to come to this. It shouldn’t have, but it did, and that’s fucked up, and I’m sorry. Tell her—” she pauses. “Tell her us girls have to stick together. Y’know? Tell her that.”

“I have her cell number,” says Darcy. “You can tell her that yourself.”

“Yer killin’ me, smalls.” O’Reilly blows out air again. “Yeah, fine. Lay it on me. What do we need to do?”

She shoots Ben Urich an email once the fire-escape conference call is done ( _expect call from B. O’Reilly, 10 AM. She thinks you’re “better than a punch in the tit,” just FYI._ ) and then clambers back inside to take her place of honor on the end of the couch. Jen sticks her feet in Darcy’s lap—an improvement, definitely, because before the past few days Jen has seemed scared to even touch Darcy, lest she break her further—and lets out a jaw-cracking yawn that has Darla, on Jen’s ribs, mimicking her. “That sounded productive.”

“I think I’m finally getting somewhere, with the Goodmans.” Darcy grabs Jen’s foot and rocks it from side to side, thoughtfully. She’s buzzing with thoughts, now. There’s no way she’s going to get to sleep now. “It’s not, y’know, a conviction or anything—that’s your job—”

Jen jams her heel into Darcy’s lap, but doesn’t deny this.

“—but…I dunno.” Darcy leans over and pets Darla. Sleepy!Darla is the best type of Darla to be petted, because sleepy!Darla doesn’t think about using her teeth. “We’re not putting him away, but we’re giving him an unholy amount of shit. It’s nice.”

Jen gives her a long, considering look. Her eyes are half-closed, as if she’s struggling to stay awake. Darcy pats her ankles, and waits, because when Jen is sleeping (or close to it) she gets more bitey, not less. Finally Jen clears her throat, and tips so she’s lying flat on her back instead of mostly on her side. “Is th-that what you want?”

“What I want?” Darcy rocks Jen’s feet again. “I don’t know if what _I_ want plays into it. It’s what, you know, we can do, within the boundaries of the system. If we’re good enough, if we raise enough of a stink, then the DA’s office can press charges, and everyone can get their asses royally whipped. That has to be enough.”

Jen closes her eyes. “That’s not the same thing.”

What does she want? Darcy bites her lip. _Put an arrow in Rich Goodman’s eye socket,_ Kate had said. She’s not sure what she wants, exactly, but she gets the feeling that that’s closer to it than anything else that’s been said the past few days. She can see it happening, the cool determination, the release of the bowstring. The hollow _thunk_ of the arrow sprouting from his eye. The blood, the shocked expression. _Yes._ The dark, curling part of her, the part of her that built itself out of fire on a dark night in an Atlanta project, breathes out a slow sigh of relief. _Yes, that_.

Darcy shies away from it, and swallows hard. She’s not sure if her hands are suddenly shaking from fear, or excitement.

“I don’t know what I want,” she says, and Jen watches her for three terrifying heartbeats before nodding, and closing her eyes.

She feels it, first. There’s a trembling in the floor under her feet, a rattling in her teeth and bones. Then she hears it: the distant, concussive _boom_ that’s unmistakable for anyone who’s lived through an alien invasion. Darla bolts from the room, probably to crawl under Jen’s bed and hide. Darcy, though—Darcy bolts to the window. There’s no way she’ll be able to see anything, not from here, but she wrenches it open anyway, clambering out onto the fire escape. Behind her, she hears Jen call her name, but she ignores it; she takes the steps two at a time, and then three, ignoring the bruised piercing ache in her side from her rib and the sudden catch in her breathing. When she crests the top of the building, she stops, clinging to the railing and heaving fit to puke.

Hell’s Kitchen is on fire. From the roof, she can see it all—a line of vivid rage, a dot-graph of flame. Four separate blasts, scattered but twinned, fingers of red reaching high into the night sky. She can hear the fire trucks starting up, cop cars and ambulances, a whirl of noise and flashing lights in the distance. There’s a clatter as Jen catches up, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Jen’s hands fly to her mouth. Her eyes are mirrors behind her glasses.

“Oh my god.”

“Is it—” she can’t finish. _Aliens?_ No, the fire’s too natural for that, and the flying monsters she remembers from the Battle of New York are nowhere to be seen. Purely human hands, then, and she only realizes she’s stopped breathing when her ribs start to hurt. Darcy gulps a deep breath, and goes through her speed dial with shaking hands. Her first call to Matt goes unanswered, as does her second; she feels sick. She calls Karen instead.

“Hello?” Karen sounds choked. Not holding-back-desperate-sobs choked, but panic-choked, smoke-choked, just-been-punched-in-the-stomach choked. “Darcy. Oh my god.”

“Karen, thank god.” Next to her, Jen’s already on the phone with the DA’s office, pacing back and forth and flinging her hand around as if she’s having a fight with invisible moths. “You’re okay?”

“Shit—yeah, I’m fine.” There’s a thunking sound. “ _Shit_.”

“Karen!”

“I’m fine, just dropped something.”

“Jesus.” She squeezes her eyes shut. _Come on, Darcy. Make a plan. You’re good at plans._ “Where’s Foggy?”

“We’re—um.” Karen’s voice is shaking but steady. “We were at Mrs. Cardenas’ apartment, and, um. The next building over blew up. So he went to see if there was—if there’s anyone else that needs help. Mrs. Cardenas, _eso es bueno, respirar, por favor._ ”

 _Idiot. Heroic idiot._ She’s going to kill him. She’s going to fucking _kill him dead_. “Foggy’s okay?”

“I think so, he didn’t look like—shit.”

“What?”

“Cut my hand. Mrs. Cardenas, can you sit up for me? _Levántate._ ”

“Mrs. Cardenas is hurt?”

“Yeah, um. She hit her head. I have to take her to the hospital.” Karen murmurs something else in Spanish that Darcy doesn’t catch. “You’re okay?”

“Yeah, I’m at home.” She passes her phone from one ear to the other, and then starts back down the fire escape. “I’m going to meet you there, okay? At the hospital. You’re closer to Metro-General, I’ll meet you at the nurse’s station in the emergency room, all right?”

“Yeah—shit.”

“Karen!”

“I’m fine.” At least she’s well enough to snarl. “Metro-General. Nurse’s station.”

“Find Foggy and get him out of there, get Mrs. Cardenas somewhere safe. You promise me?”

“Yeah, I promise.” Karen coughs, and swears again. “Be careful. Okay?”

“You too.” She hangs up. She wants to call Foggy, too, but if he’s picking his way around a damaged, possibly burning, possibly collapsing building— _god, please don’t let it be collapsing_ —then she doesn’t want to scare him and make him fall through a wall or something. So she calls Matt again instead. Then, when he doesn’t pick up, again. And again.  “Pick up the phone.” She’s fraying. Her hands are shaking. She’s going to scream. “Goddammit, Matt, pick up the _phone_!”

There’s nothing but a dial tone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bennnnnnn. 
> 
> Okay. So. Um. You all are amazing. I asked for a cover, and you gave me like...four. And they're all gorgeous. I'm going to make mixlists for all of them because you're all so awesome.
> 
> Those of who who sent me covers need to tell me what sort of Darcy oneshots they want, because _holy shit you guys_
> 
> On that note, Kurukami also made an awesome mix for The Price of War, which can be found here (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/sdqq9fam2xet72v/AAAsaqZ4gsIUjr73Yu8jDnUMa?dl=0) ! It's much more amazing than any piddling attempt I have made, but I have one done and posted on 8tracks nonetheless. That can be found here (http://8tracks.com/shuofthewind/the-price-of-war). The others are being developed as I write this.
> 
> Just. UGH. YOU GUYS ARE THE BEST. YOU ARE THE BEST READERS EVER.


	7. First, Do No Harm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for: hospital life, discussions of injuries (the sort that would come about from some asshole setting half the city on fire, so, burns, broken bones, cuts and blood), injections, stitching, references to shootings, references to riots, alcohol, discussion of violence, and discussion of hypothetical execution. 
> 
> Some of you may notice the difference in the chapter count! I am about two chapters (maybe a little less) ahead of you guys, and Stick apparently had a lot to say, so I had to cut one chappie in two to satisfy my word count issues. (I try to stay about 8500, though I do get really close to 9k on occasion.) The remainder of the fic should still align with the one-chapter-one-episode schema I was using before. Cheers, Stick, you assholish sassbucket you! 
> 
> Unbeta'ed, but I've edited as best I can.

_He’s alive. He’s okay. He has to be._

The lobby of Metro-General Hospital is a fucking shitshow, and the emergency room is even worse. Darcy catches up with a woman carrying her sixteen-year-old son on the way in, and slings an arm around his waist, because one of his legs is broken and there’s no way his mother is going to make it inside without dropping him again. _Matt’s alive,_ she tells herself. _He’s alive._ Just inside the automatic doors, she plasters herself to the wall to get out of the way of two construction workers dragging an unconscious third between them; one of them has a bloody sleeve wrapped around his head. _He has to be._ And before she gets to the nurses’ station, Darcy finds a twelve-year-old girl with leg braces, full-cuff crutches, and an arm that’s shiny and blistered with burns, crying quietly to herself. She glances at the nurse’s counter—no one available—and then crouches in front of her. “Hi,” she says. “What’s your name?”

The girl blinks at her. She’s black (Darcy’s not sure if she’s African-American or Haitian-American or an immigrant or somewhere in between) and her hair’s done up in dreds. Some of the braids are scorched. She swallows three times, and then throws up in Darcy’s lap. Darcy ignores it. “Sil,” she says after a moment, and Darcy nods.

“Sil what?”

“Sil—Silhouette. Chord,” she adds, when Darcy gives her a look. “Silhouette Chord.”

“Okay, Sil. Are your parents here?”

Sil shakes her head slowly, and starts to draw away. “My—my brother’s somewhere. I don’t know.”

“Okay. That’s okay. Um.” _He’s okay. Head in the moment, Lewis._ Darcy looks down at her legs (just water and stomach acid, not much to worry about) and then over at the nurse’s station again. “I have to find my friends. Do you want to come with me to look, or do you want to stay here and wait for your brother?”

Sil studies her for a long moment. Then she reaches out with her good arm (her burned one is pressed close into her stomach) and tugs on the edge of Darcy’s sweatshirt. Her eyes are glassy, more with shock than tears. “Sorry,” she says. “I threw up on you.”

“Not my first time being puked on, puppycat. Come on, let’s see if we can get someone to treat your burns.”

By the time she grabs a nurse who will slow down long enough to actually see how swollen and painful Sil’s arm is, she’s steadied herself a little. Darcy heads over to the nurse’s station, volunteering to hand out orange juice to the less-critical blood loss patients. The matron takes one look at her, and then directs her to the cafeteria, where they apparently keep orange juice by the bucketful. She’s paired off with a nurse named Leesa, probably to make sure that she doesn’t steal drugs or anything, but Darcy doesn’t care. _Keep moving,_ she thinks. _Keep thinking._ She calls Matt every five minutes or so, and the phone just rings out.

Foggy and Karen show up about twenty minutes into her new regime, Mrs. Cardenas propped up between them. A plain-clothes nurse with excellent Spanish whisks Elena away, and Darcy’s moving before she realizes she’s taken a step, crashing into the pair of them with the force of a hurricane. Her orange juice spills down Foggy’s back, and he yelps, but he wraps one arm tight around her waist and holds on. Darcy hooks her free arm around Karen’s neck, and goes up on tiptoe between them, pressing as close as she can. _Breathing. Living. Good._ “Oh my god.” She feels like she should be babbling. “Oh my god, you guys.”

“You dumped orange juice on me,” says Foggy, but he’s not complaining about it. “It’s cold.”

“Fuck you, I’m being a good samaritan.” She’s also pretty sure that the nurses have more important things to do right now than to make sure people have enough juice, so whatever. “Have either of you heard from Matt?”

“Not yet,” says Foggy, reedy. “You haven’t either?”

It feels as though something’s frozen her insides, like her ribs are snapping into shards of frost. Darcy squeezes her eyes shut for a long moment. “He’s fine,” she tells them. She’s mostly telling herself. “He’ll be home, and the news says—well, the blasts weren’t near there. So he’s fine.” _He has to be fine._ She pulls back, and her heart breaks. “Karen, your head!”

“What?” Karen touches a hand to her temple, and then blanches. There's more dried blood on the heel of her palm, from a gash in the meat of her hand. Darcy's not sure if Karen's noticed it yet. “No, no. Not me. Um. Mrs. Cardenas—she has a cut on her head. It’s hers, not mine.”

Foggy’s still stuck on this _no one knows where Matt is_ thing. “You looked to see if Matt’s been checked in somewhere?”

“I asked them to tell me if his name crosses their desk.” Darcy steps back, and grabs a thing of paper towels off the back of the nearest janitor’s cart, dumping a handful of them onto the orange juice spill. “Okay, I need to—yeah. I have juice to hand out.”

At the same time Karen says, “Foggy, you’re bleeding!” and all hell breaks loose again. It takes half an hour to get him fixed, and during that time she calls Matt twice, and Jen once (Jen’s fine, still at the apartment, “t-take care of yourself right now, Darcy.”). She thinks about calling Mike, too, but then decides against it. Worst possible time to call a vigilante: when the city’s burning to the ground.

She still shoots him a text, though. Claire, too. Just, y’know. To be a good neighbor.

There’s not any reason for them to wheel Foggy in for X-rays, not when his breathing’s good and he’s just bleeding onto the better of his two work suits, They stitch him up, stick him with a tetanus shot (“god, that’s worse than the glass”) and then Darcy settles him on the bench next to a silent, watchful Sil, forcing orange juice into his hands. (" _Drink it or die, Nelson._ ") The crowding’s getting worse; it seems like a million different types of people are all coming in with burns, broken bones, slit arteries, missing appendages, all the best symptoms of an act of terrorism.

Mrs. Cardenas is set up in a room of her own, because she apparently has much better insurance than anyone expected, and Karen drags Foggy into the relative quiet of Elena's private recovery room just to keep him from freaking out on her every ten minutes. Still, a good hour goes by—maybe two, even—before the plain-clothes nurse who took Mrs. Cardenas away stops next to her, and does a double-take.

“I heard someone was helping,” she says, and Darcy slops orange juice onto herself. One of the nurses had finally noticed Sil’s puke on her pants, and handed over scrubs, so she at least looks semi-legit coming in and out of the juice room. (Leesa had vanished about an hour ago to help in an emergency surgery, and Darcy had long since sent one of the interns out to buy more juice from the cafeteria, loads of different kinds. She has a selection, now, plus chocolate milk.) “But Jesus. I didn’t think it was you.”

Darcy blinks. Then she blinks again, and narrows her eyes. “ _Claire_?” she says, in a low whisper, and Claire nods. She’s beautiful, gorgeous hair and full lips even under all the bruises—and shit, but those are definitely some bruises. Swollen eyes, split lip, cuts, abrasions, everything and then some. _Oh, Claire._ “Fancy meeting you here,” she says, and her voice cracks. “I think I’m going to faint now.”

“Don’t you dare.” Claire glances back over her shoulder, then grabs Darcy by the elbow and tugs her into the break room. There are two other nurses hiding out in here, and when they see Claire, they abruptly clam up and dart away. Claire kicks the door most of the way shut, and maneuvers Darcy down into a chair, pushing her head between her knees. “You’re okay,” says Claire. It’s not a question. “Nothing broken, bleeding, otherwise incapacitated?”

Darcy gulps air, staring at the linoleum. _Brooklyn marble_ , Foggy calls it. “Um,” she says. “A burned girl threw up on me earlier, but other than that I’m good. I wasn’t close enough to, you know. Get hurt.”

“Common reaction to pain to people who aren’t used to it.” Darcy tries to sit up, but Claire shoves her head back down again. “Breathe. The interns can hand out the juice, that’s technically their job. Do you always take over everywhere you go?”

“I’m a manager,” says Darcy in a faint voice, and Claire snorts.

“You and me both. Five minutes. Sit,” she snaps, and Darcy’s too scared to disobey. “I’ll be back.”

“Okay,” Darcy says, but Claire’s already whirled out the door again. She snaps a few orders at the interns crowding around outside, half in Spanish, half in English, and then she’s gone. Darcy keeps her head between her knees until she’s absolutely certain she’s not going to hyperventilate and/or faint dead away, and then she sits up, slowly. The break room is all plaster and bad paint and Brooklyn marble. Someone’s pasted a “caution: radioactive” sign on the refrigerator. Darcy’s not certain if it’s a joke or not. There’s a moth beating itself to death against the fluorescent bulbs. In the pocket of her borrowed scrubs, her phone chirps to let her know it’s dying, and then falls silent again.

It’s very quiet in here. Outside, she can hear the news still going, the burble of new info and new theories and footage of burning buildings, but in here it’s just…muffled. She can hear voices, but not words. The digital clock on the wall reads 2:49 in the morning. Darcy clenches her hands tight around the legs of her scrub pants, and holds her breath.

She needs to do something. There’s something crackling through her blood like lightning, or sparks. It had been the same right after the incident, when she’d wandered through Midtown and taken stock of the damage done to her adopted city. She’d noticed a group of volunteers in bright green shirts collecting crap off the street, and joined them without a word, because she’d needed to do something, anything, to keep her muscles from twitching. Her hands ache. She can’t just sit here, not like this, not with girls like Sil with no one to look out for them. There’s something building in her throat that feels almost like a scream. _Move, don’t think._ But Claire will yell at her if she moves, and she’s so tired, all of a sudden, so goddamn bone tired, that she can’t twitch an inch away from this chair. Her eyes pinch and burn. _Move, don’t think. Not about any of it. Not about Matt._

Darcy hiccups. She gets to her feet, and starts pacing in tight circles, around and around the shitty old table that’s been set up for people to eat off of. She feels cold. Or hot, she can’t tell, but it’s one of the two, something that’s making her nerves prickle and jump like static. There’s blood and charcoal and dirt smeared on the thighs of her scrubs from where she helped carry someone to a bench for a nurse to work on. _Go_ , her lizard brain hisses, _move, don’t think, move, run, fight_ , but she’s in this room, and Matt’s somewhere else, and he’s _not answering his fucking phone._

Abruptly, Darcy drops back into her chair, and bursts into tears.

She’s trying to stop herself from crying and only succeeding in getting snot on every available surface when Claire comes back in, and stops dead. “Oh, Jesus,” says Claire, but not in a _for god’s sake_ kind of way. More in a _this is just gonna be one of those nights_ sort of way. “Darcy, breathe. You’re going to hyperventilate if you keep that up.”

“I’m sorry.” Darcy wipes uselessly at her eyes. “I’m just—I don’t—Jesus Christ, I’m such a spazz, I’m crying in your fucking _break room—_ ”

Claire drags a chair around to face Darcy’s, and straddles it, wrapping her arms around the back. She pats uselessly at Darcy’s shoulder, but it doesn’t really help. Darcy hates crying; it makes her feel as if her personality is leaking out of her, as if she’s losing something in her spine that keeps her upright the rest of the time. She gulps, and swallows hard—because if she throws up here she will _never_ forgive herself—and hides her face in the sleeves of her hoodie for a minute or two, until the wailing has dropped down to just weird little snorting hiccups that she can mostly swallow back. Claire pets aimlessly at her shoulder until the noise level drops below a six, and then offers a small silver hip flask.

“Here,” she says. “I stole it from Jenna’s locker. I don’t know what it is but it’s fucking powerful.”

Darcy laughs. It sounds damp. The booze is something that might be some sort of bourbon, if it hadn’t been cheap as shit; it makes her eyes water and her nose burn and sets fire to her insides in a very unpleasant way, and even Darcy has to choke for a second or two as she swallows. “Jesus.” She sniffs at it, and recoils. “That’s not booze, that’s paint thinner.”

“I know, right?” Claire steals the flask back, and takes a sip. “God. Shit’s disgusting.”

“You’re telling me.” She makes grabby hands at it, and Claire passes it back to her. “Jesus. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to have a meltdown in your break room.”

“You are by far not the first person to have a breakdown in the break room. That’s why it’s called the break room.” Claire prods at her lip, and hisses a little. “God, that stings.”

Darcy gives her the flask back. “Is it as bad as it looks?”

“Worse,” says Claire flatly, and clears her throat. “Jesus, that shit’s powerful.” She eyes Darcy for a moment. “You look almost exactly like your picture.”

“You look almost nothing like I imagined,” says Darcy honestly, and Claire smirks a little. She leans back, hooking her hair out of her face.

“Way hotter, right?”

“Yeah, it’s like you’re the sun. I’m getting burned.”

Claire snorts. Then she winces. “Ugh, no. No laughing. Ribs hurt.”

“It gets worse before it gets better.” Darcy sets a hand against her side, where her Ace bandages are pinching at her hip. “At least in my experience.”

She makes a face. “Someone beat you up, too?”

“Yeah.” There’s not really much else she can say about it. “It kinda sucked.”

“God, don’t get me started.” She tips the flask back, and then caps it off. It’s not nearly enough to get Darcy even close to buzzed, but she still feels a little better. _Is this how alcoholics are made?_ “So?” Claire asks. “What’s the panic attack for?”

“The fact that four buildings just blew up for no reason isn’t enough?”

“Someone was taking out the Russians,” says Claire. “Fisk, M—our friend said. When I talked to him.”

“You talked to him?” Darcy closes her eyes, and lets out a breath. “Thank god. I didn’t want to call and bother him, but—”

“He had some stuff to do, so it’s probably better that you didn’t.” Claire shoves the flask into the back of her pants, the way action heroes do with guns. “So? Just overwhelmed with shit? It’s okay if you are, I spent most of yesterday night crying.”

“I know,” says Darcy. “I stayed awake and listened to you.”

Claire makes a face at her, and then makes an odd, pained yipping noise. She touches her cheek. “ _God._ Fucking—I never want to get beat up again.”

“Do I have to talk about it?”

“No, but it might help.” She huffs. “Or something, I don’t know. I’m a nurse, not a therapist.”

“You know, I get the feeling you’re kind of an asshole.”

“Psh.” Claire flaps a hand at her. “No more booze for you.”

“Mean.” She can’t meet Claire’s eyes anymore. Darcy stares at her hands for a minute or two, picking at her nail polish in an effort to keep her fingers from shaking. It doesn’t really work. “Um. I don’t know. A few people I know were really close to the blast, I guess. And—and one of them was hurt. And my—my best friend, or one of them, he won’t call me back. So I don’t know if something’s happened, and I can’t…I don’t know.” Her eyes start stinging all over again. “Oh, god.”

“Don’t be sick on the floor,” Claire says, and shoves a wastebasket at her. Darcy swallows hard, and realizes she’s gone right back to crying when she tastes salt on her lips. She gulps, clutching at the wastebasket like it’s a lifeline. “Your friend. Where was he?”

“I d-don’t know.” She’s even fucking stuttering. Darcy scrubs at her face, hating the way her make-up smears, hating the way she’s falling apart. She _does not fall apart_. She’s Darcy Fucking Lewis. Falling apart is for other people, goddammit. “We split up this afternoon, he said he had some things to do, and I keep calling him but he won’t pick up, and I don’t—oh, god.”

“Breathe. Who are your other friends?”

“Um.” She swallows back bile, and hangs her head, trying to breathe. “The—they’re on the bench across from the nurses’ station, Foggy Nelson and—and Karen Page. With the girl with leg braces, Sil. They brought another woman in with them, Elena Cardenas, they—they said she was hurt too—”

“Elena will be fine.” Claire touches Darcy’s shoulder. “I need you to sit here and breathe for me, okay? Just breathe. Your friend will be fine, I’m certain of it.”

“You can’t know that. Matt, he’s—he’s _blind_ , I don’t know if—oh, god.”

Claire’s quiet for a long, terrible moment. Then she grips Darcy hard at the back of the neck, shaking her a little, as if to wake her. “Darcy, listen to me. Your friend will be fine. The EMTs are out searching for everyone who could have possibly been caught in the blast, and I highly doubt Matt—” her voice cracks a little “—was in range of the explosions. His phone might just be turned on silent. But I need you to focus right now, because those people out there need help, and _you_ need to do something before you break down entirely.”

Darcy squeezes her eyes shut. “Okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Okay.” She digs her fingernails into the wastebasket. “What do I need to do?”

“You already have an army of interns out there. Keep them going. There was a shooting near one of the blast zones, and so it’s possible we might have a riot or two on our hands before the night’s out. We’re all going to be busy, and you seem to have been doing a good job at keeping people calm. So I need you to keep doing that, all right? Can you do that?”

For a second, all she can think of is Kate Bishop’s face in the elevator at Goodman-Okamura, ashen, horrified. Darcy nods. “Yeah. I can do that.”

“Good.” Claire nods. “Wash your face. You look like shit.”

“If people keep telling me that, I’m going to start believing them.”

.

.

.

The phone rings.

“Hello?”

“It’s Claire.”

“…oh.”

“I told myself I wouldn’t talk to you until I have my head on straight. I am _really fucking angry_ that I had to break that promise to myself. In less than a day.”

“I assume that you have a good reason.”

“I ran into a friend of yours tonight. She told me an interesting story, about a friend of hers who’s blind. She was terrified because he wasn’t answering his phone, and she didn’t know if he was dead or not.”

“…I see.”

“Funny thing is, two sentences earlier she’s all relieved that I’ve heard from _Mike_ , that I’ve heard from _him_ , that _he’s_ okay.”

“Claire.”

“So, you know, I’m thinking, as I’m stitching up cuts and treating burns and everything else I had to do tonight, she can’t honestly think that the two of you are different people. But the thing is, she _does_ , and what really surprises me is that you’re letting her.”

“You know why.”

“Yes, of _course_ I know why, Matt, I _get_ why, but for god’s sake, _she doesn’t_. This isn’t fair, not to her. Actually, no, rewind—it’s fucking _cruel_. You know how hysterical she was? No, because you left your phone in the apartment. I heard it ringing when I left.”

“Claire—”

“I get it, okay? I get how dangerous it would be, and I get that you don’t want to lie to her, but for Christ’s sake, _she’s already involved_. You told me, what’s so dangerous about telling her?”

“You don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand?”

“What do you want me to do, Claire? What is it, exactly, that you want me to do? What, tell her—tell her that the person that rescued her from being brutalized in an alleyway is actually the kid she’s known since freshman year of college? Tell her I’ve been—I’ve been lying to her, to all of them, since the first minute, since the first _second_ when they looked at me and I had to pretend I didn’t realize they were doing it? What do you expect me to do? I _can’t_ tell her that. Not yet. Not right now.”

“…I understand that. Okay? I don’t get it, but I understand it. But Matt, seriously—either you tell her or she’s going to figure it out, because she’s not fucking stupid, and you’re going to have to decide which is worse: having her hate you for a while, but then thank you for telling the truth, or having her work it out on her own, and blame you for the lies?”

“…shit, Claire.”

“I have to go. More patients are coming in.”

“Are they still there?”

“I’m assuming you mean your friends, and no. They were discharged an hour ago. My suggestion?”

“Should I ask?”

“Get your ass home and answer your fucking phone.”

.

.

.

Dawn in Hell’s Kitchen smells like smoke and fog and overcooked Chinese food. Darcy’s not about to let Foggy go home alone ("Christ, Lewis, stop nagging me, I'm fine!" "Foggy, I swear to god, if you try to walk off on me while you're on pain meds I will nail your feet to the goddamn floor."), and Karen is still sleeping on their couch (she hasn’t been able to find an apartment yet that has both running water _and_ working electricity) so when Darcy opens the door, it’s with Karen and Foggy at her heels. Jen’s asleep with her head pillowed on the kitchen table, but she snaps out of it as soon as the door clicks shut, and whacks both her knees on the underside of the table in her effort to get to them.

“Oh my god.” She wraps her arms around Foggy, and then tugs a pleased-looking Karen into it as well. Darcy sighs. _Tall person advantage._ Neither Foggy nor Karen have to bend over to hug _Jen._ “You’re all okay. Thank god.”

“Ow,” says Foggy. “I mean, yes. We’re okay.”

Thankfully, Jen doesn’t notice. “How bad is it out there?”

“It’s definitely been worse.” Darcy reaches back, and grips Foggy’s elbow tight when he tries to maneuver himself into the nearest chair. “Nope. No sitting. Bed. Come on.”

“Darcy—”

“Nelson. Bed. Karen, couch.”

“But—”

“Fine. You can shower first, Karen. Foggy. _Bed_.”

“But Matt—”

 _Don’t say it again. Don’t._ “I’ll find Matt. Don’t worry about that.”

“Darcy.”

“Out of the three of us, who is the only one who hasn’t been caught in an explosion in the past twelve hours?” Darcy pushes them both, gentler than she would have yesterday. “Go to sleep, guys. Matt will be here when you wake up if I have to drag him here myself.”

She doesn’t know if she’s lying, and her mouth tastes sour with it. Karen and Foggy are too tired to even notice the look on her face. Darcy settles Foggy on her bed, throws a blanket over him (he hadn’t even made it under the covers before passing out), and then checks on Karen, already curled up with Darla on the couch. She shuts the kitchen door behind her, so she doesn’t wake either of them, and then sags. Jen starts up out of her chair again, wide-eyed. “Darcy?”

“Jen.” Darcy gives her a vague smile. “I think my guiding line just snapped.”

“Oh, honey.” Jen scoots back from the table, and kisses the top of Darcy’s head, pulling her close. She smells clean, like detergent and coffee and home, and Darcy can’t help the little shudder that runs from the top of her head down to her feet because of it. Jen doesn’t notice. “Now,” she says, pulling back. “Tell me the t-truth. How bad is it?”

“I don’t know.” Darcy drops down into her chair at the table, and Jen starts to bustle around, dumping out old coffee grounds and scraping a new set out of the can. “The hospital wasn’t fun. There was a shooting, too, one of the nurses said. A cop died, or he’s been hospitalized, or something. I don’t know.”

Jen’s eyes flicker. “That vigilante, the news was saying. That’s who they’re blaming for the shootings.”

“ _What_?” She nearly shrieks it. Jen makes _be quiet_ gestures with her hands, and Darcy bites her tongue. “But he _wouldn’t_.”

“We d-don’t know that for sure.”

“But—” _but he saved me._ “But it’s not his MO. He—he _helps_ people, beats up bad guys with his bare hands, he doesn’t—he doesn’t _rig bombs_ across the city and kill police officers! Seriously, why would he try to kill cops, he’s never gone near them before—”

“It’s not for us to say that, Darcy.” Darcy swallows. “It’s—I g-get it, okay? Just—wait for the evidence. It’s all we can do.”

 _Because we’re lawyers. That’s what we’re meant for._ “Yeah,” she says. There’s a scrape on the inside of her wrist that she can’t remember getting. Darcy picks at it with her fingernails. “I know.”

Jen watches her through half-lidded eyes. Then she sighs, pressing the plunger of the coffee press down in one smooth motion. “I have work at seven-thirty. Mind if I steal the shower?”

She smells like blood and juice and hospital, but Darcy shakes her head. “Go ahead. I’ll be fine out here. I’m—I’m gonna watch the news.”

Jen kisses the top of Darcy’s head again. It feels too much like pity, and doesn’t help at all.

Darcy throws her puked-on pajama pants, her shirt, and her borrowed scrubs into the washing machine, along with her underwear for good measure, and then stalks naked through the apartment to get shit out of her room again. Foggy’s completely dead to the world, even when she opens the door and stubs her toe on her dresser. Darcy shimmies into real-person clothes (well, as real as her comfiest jeans and a sweatshirt are, anyway) and then touches his foot underneath the blankets once. It’s more to reassure herself that he’s there than anything. Foggy doesn’t even twitch.

 _Clothes,_ she thinks, looking at him. She has some of his old college shit in her dresser somewhere, and Darcy’s always favored baggy clothes anyway. He’d probably fit in those. Karen needs clothes too, but thankfully she’s moved most of her shit from her old apartment (which is now up for rent again) into the hall closet while she sleeps on the pull-out couch. Darcy’s tempted to just reorganize her room so that they can drag another mattress in; she’s never had so much spending money available in her life, what with Karen insisting that she pay half of Darcy’s rent. _Too bad most of it’s going to go right into hospital bills,_ she thinks. But having another roommate…maybe.

She grabs her purse before slipping back out of her room and shutting the door quietly behind her.

She doesn’t feel better, having the gun within reach, but she does feel safer, which matters more. It’s not much of a thing, a semiautomatic pistol with an old inscription on the base— _to L, with love, X_ —but thanks to a number of misadventures as a teenager in the Atlanta projects, she knows exactly how to use it. It’s also highly illegal, because she bought it in a pawn shop without a license attached, and she has yet to bully Brett out of one for herself. She leaves it in the purse, safety on, and sets the whole thing, bag and all, in the middle of the kitchen table, within easy reach.

She doesn’t call Matt again. She calls Mike, instead—“hey, just wanted to, you know, confirm that you’re alive and stuff. Call me back, okay?”—and then pours herself coffee. The burner phone buzzes with a message from Claire. _Sil’s brother picked her up. Stop worrying._

_You say that like it’s possible._

_STOP WORRYING,_ Claire texts again. Darcy doesn’t reply.

The news is playing a clip of Mike over and over again, back-to-backing shots of burning buildings and interviews with random bystanders with brutal video of the devil of Hell’s Kitchen beating the living shit out of New York City police officers. Or Russian mobsters, the video’s too grainy for her to be really be able to tell. Darcy flexes her fingers, and sighs. Her bones are melting inside her skin. She’s plastered to her chair and jittering out of it simultaneously, a junkie too tired to move. She needs a jog around the block, or something. She needs—

Someone knocks on the door. Darcy stares hard at the TV, where Hoffman—looking very shaky—is giving an interview again, and then draws the gun from her purse. Jen’s still in the shower; she can hear the water running.

For a second, she can’t make out the face beyond the peephole. There’s just a flash of Columbia sweatshirt and the glint of glasses in the dawn. Then she sees the hair, and it clicks with a surge of fury and relief that makes her whole body go limp. _Matt._ Bruised, his glasses lopsided, in his worst fucking sweatshirt, but alive. _Matt._ Her mouth turns bone dry. Darcy shoves the gun into the umbrella stand (Matt won’t be able to see it, but she’s not about to leave it on the coat rack for Jen to find) and fumbles the door open. He lifts his head, lips parting, but before he can say anything, Darcy’s balled up a fist and punched him hard in the shoulder.

Matt yelps. She squeezes her hand tight and hits him again, and one more time, before he manages to get a grip on her arm and hold her still. “Darcy,” he says, and fuck him, fuck his goddamn voice, she’s _not going to cry again._

“You _prick._ ” She kicks him in the shin, hard enough for Matt to stagger. “You fucking _prick._ You didn’t answer your phone, you prick, you asshole, you scared the shit out of me, what the _hell_ —”

“Hey.” Matt covers her hand with his, and the touch makes her breathing hitch. There are new marks on his face, scrapes and bruises she doesn’t recognize, and she can’t breathe, all of a sudden, she can't _breathe_. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m okay.”

“No you’re not.” Her eyes are blurring. Goddammit. “No, you’re all—you’re all beat up again, why are you all beat up again—”

“It’s nothing. I’m fine.” He catches her other hand, too, closing his fingers over her fist. His voice is very soft. “I’m all right, Darcy.”

“You didn’t answer.” The words crack in her mouth. “God fucking dammit, Matthew. I called and called and you didn’t answer. I thought—I thought something had happened to you, I thought you were in the blast, I thought—”

“I’m sorry.” She can’t work out if he’s talking over her, or she’s talking over him, but either way their voices are overlapping in a way that is putting her back up and settling her hackles all at once. “I’m sorry, my phone was on silent, I fell asleep, I didn’t know—”

“You asshole _,_ ” she says again, and then she starts to cry again, because apparently, this is the best day _ever_. Darcy muffles her face in her hands, trying to stay quiet— _Karen, Foggy, I can’t wake them up._ She _shouldn’t_ cry, but goddammit, she’s tired, and she’s been having images of a dead Matt every time she’s shut her eyes for hours or days or an eternity, and she’s just so fucking _done_ with everything that she can’t get herself to stop. “You _asshole._ ”

Matt skims his hands up her arms to her shoulders and tugs her into him, no question, no hesitation, and Darcy almost chokes from relief. Here’s Matt, and his heart’s beating and his lungs are working, and she’s going to fucking _kill_ him just as soon as she gets a chance to breathe. Darcy unwinds herself from her tangle to wrap her arms around him, digging her fingernails into the back of his shoulders and hiding her face in the collar of his sweatshirt. For some reason his lungs jump into a little hiccup, like she’s scared him or something. Then he cups the back of her head in one hand, pressing her closer, and she starts to shake. His other arm is tight around her waist.

“I’m sorry.” He turns his head, pressing his lips to her temple. She ignores the pinch of his cane against her back, how her glasses are being crushed against the bridge of her nose, because he’s alive, god fucking damn him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m sorry.”

“You’re an _asshole._ ”

“I know.” His nails scrape against her scalp. “I’m sorry.”

If she opens her eyes, she can see the dip between his collarbones. For a single, insane second, she wants to put her lips to that spot, touch it with her tongue. She concentrates on the feel of his fingers in her hair instead, because that’s safer. That means she knows he’s alive, because he’s still hooking his nails against her scalp the way you would a cat, and it’s soothing enough to make her stupid.

“You’re okay?” Matt pulls back just enough to touch his thumb to her cheek, where the bruises from the fight are just starting to fade. “Everyone’s okay?”

“Foggy’s hurt.” He goes brittle against her, and Darcy clears her throat. “Just a cut, a glass cut. They stitched him up. They say he’ll be okay. Um, Mrs. Cardenas is still in the hospital though. They want to keep her for a while because she has a bad concussion. But the rest of us are fine.”

Matt starts cursing quite vividly under his breath. The words buzz against her ribs like hornets. Darcy closes her eyes and draws a deep breath. Then she pulls away. “Come on,” she says. “No grumbling. Coffee instead. Inside.”

The noise Matt makes at the mention of coffee can only be called obscene _._ Darcy pretends very hard that her ears aren’t burning.

Jen’s making French toast, which means beating off Darla with a stick—Darla’s obsessed with maple syrup. She drips some of the egg on Darla’s head when she sees Matt come in, but other than clearing her throat loudly, and prodding at the cat, she doesn’t react at all. “Matthew,” she says. “Nice of you to show up.”

Matt’s lips twitch. Darcy lets his hand slip away, or starts to, but his fingers crook and catch at hers again, so she holds on instead. “Jennifer. I assume you look well.”

“Brat,” says Jen, and reaches up to ruffle his hair as she goes by. Judging by the look on Matt’s face, she’s dripped syrup in it. Darcy settles his palm against the back of a nearby chair, and goes to take over the toast.

“Shut the door.” She whacks at Darla with her foot, and hisses at her. “Foggy and Karen need the sleep, and if either of them smell food there’s nothing for it.”

Matt tips his chair back, and knocks the door shut with his elbow. He’s not a big guy, exactly, but he’s taller than Darcy by a lot, and definitely has more weight to him than Jen. Somehow, he doesn’t look awkward or squashed at their tiny kitchen table. He rests his elbows on the table top, and folds his hands together. He hasn’t taken off his glasses, though, and for some reason that stings a little.

“I can’t believe you slept through a terrorist attack.” Darcy flips the toast in the pan, and the hiss just manages to cover up how much her voice shakes. “Jesus, Murdock.”

“Sorry,” says Matt again. Darcy grunts, and turns the news back up. Still all a rehash. Once, she thinks she catches a glimpse of Ben Urich interviewing an EMT in the background, but it doesn’t cycle back, so there’s no way for her to really tell. Darcy shovels toast onto a plate, and turns the TV off in a fit of pique.

“Y’know,” she says. “We have a sign in this kitchen.”

“‘Shit happens?’”

She snorts. “No, but we should have one of those. No, it says, ‘leave your Catholic guilt at the door.’ It’s a very official sign. Has the pope’s seal on it and everything. So take your good Catholic boy act and toss it out the window, okay? Pretty please.”

“Darcy.”

“Nope.”

“I scared you. I think I’m obligated to feel bad for it.” He frowns. “And it’s not Catholic guilt. That’s—I think that’s more about sexual abstinence than anything.”

“Which we all know you’re such a fan of.” He makes a face at her, and Darcy laughs. “Yeah, you scared the shit out of me, but you apologized. Apologies don’t fix things, but they help a lot. Like, a good eighty percent of the time.” She sets a plate of French toast aside for Jen, and starts on the next batch. “I’m totally okay with you making it up to me, possibly with sugary foodstuffs and/or alcohol, but going all doom and gloom about shit you can’t change doesn’t help anyone.”

Matt doesn’t speak. He props his chin in one hand, and if Darcy didn’t know better, she’d say he’s watching her. She’s turned another slice of toast in the pan and dragged the powdered sugar out of the back of the cabinet before he leans his chair back again, balancing the way a kid would. “You don’t like Catholics very much, do you?”

“Nope. Out of my house.” She can see him roll his eyes behind his glasses. Darcy drenches a fresh slice of toast in sugar and cherry syrup, turns off the stove, and thunks down into her chair again, drawing one leg up against her chest. “I’ve never really been much for any kind of religion. You know this.”

“No, I know.” Matt’s fingers curl against the table. “I just— _Catholic guilt_.”

He says it the same way you’d say _fresh strawberries_ or _cheap booze_ or _free computer_ , like it’s the sort of thing that he can’t imagine someone having a problem with. Coincidentally, all three of the above are things that Darcy has had a great many problems with, starting with the discovery of an unfortunate strawberry allergy at the age of six. She sighs, and cuts into the French toast with her fork. “Yeah. It’s like—I don’t know if it’s all religious people, or all Catholics, or if it’s just you—and it seriously might just be just you—”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” She catches a dribble of syrup before it hits the sleeve of her hoodie. “It’s just—it’s like you think you need to take the blame for everything. It’s not bad to feel remorse, obviously, especially if you’ve done something wrong— _which I’m not saying you have_ —but…I dunno. It always seemed kind of self-important to me to _mea culpa_ everything. Like—there are billions of people in the world, and that means there are trillions of factors that go into every single thing that happens to everyone on the planet. Nothing is ever all your fault, quantifiably. Saying that it is—is like taking ownership of the universe. Which also seems like identifying yourself with God, if we’re really gonna go down the Catholic route this early in the morning. But you’re punishing yourself for something that’s not your fault, and you do it all the time. It just seems masochistic.”

Matt brushes his thumb over his lower lip. “I don’t know if that’s the point of it. I was taught that everyone has to take responsibility for the effect they have, individually or otherwise. If you hurt someone, you’re responsible for it. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Sort of.”

“But if you do something nice for someone, God’s hand guides you?”

He shrugs. “My grandmother never managed to get to that part, before she died. And the nuns at St. Agnes were more concerned about my mental health than my soul, especially at the start.”

 _Right after his dad died._ Her throat squeezes. She has to clench her hand around her fork to keep from touching him. Darcy takes another bite of toast, and chews it slowly, to give herself time to think. “I guess what I’m trying to say that, y’know, as an atheist, the concept of attributing all my positive actions to God and all my shitty ones to myself is incomprehensible.”

“The way it was explained to me, it’s not that you’re attributing your positive decisions and the results of them to God and God’s influence. It’s more like—you know, through the goodness of your actions, God comes through you.” He pauses. “Of course, you have to do something good for that to happen. If you do something wrong, then it’s—who knows. It’s you, or the Devil, or evil, or the snake, or whatever you want to call it. The Bible contradicts itself a lot.”

“Hmm.” She squashes toast under her fork. “Do you believe that?”

“The exact word of the Bible?” Matt asks, and sticks his finger in a pool of cherry syrup on her plate. “I don’t know. It’s been a while since I read it, and I stopped feeling like I was welcome in a church years ago.”

“Hm.” She’s not really hungry anymore. Darcy pushes her plate at him, and leans back in her chair. “So you still believe in God?”

“Yeah. Same way I believe in the law, or in clouds, or anything else that’s whole and real. Even if I can’t see it.”

Darcy blows hair out of her face. “But the law changes depending on who writes it.”

“Technically, so does God, because there wouldn’t be so many differing versions of Him otherwise.” Matt swipes at the cherry syrup again. “Everyone has a different interpretation, and I’m not the best Catholic anyway. Part of it is ritual, part of it is skepticism, and part of it is belief. I do think that there’s something bigger out there, but whether or not it fits within the scope of any religion is questionable.”

“That sounds downright pagan of you, Matthew.”

“Bite me,” says Matt, and cuts the remainder of her toast in half.

“I mean, I’m for it. I’m only as Jewish as it takes to get me challah, man.” Jen slinks in, collects her plate and her cup of coffee. “But yeah. The technical definition of atheism doesn’t exactly fit with what I am, because I believe in human souls, and I believe that souls are immutable and eternal, but, you know. I don’t believe in a _god_ , quote-unquote. Jenny-Jen, you’re making a face. Don’t make that face.”

Jen doesn’t un-wrinkle her nose. “It is way too early in the morning for theology.”

“ _You_ had a chance to sleep.”

“Touché. Coffee?”

“Top me up, lady. Matt?”

“I can get it.”

“No, you sit. You’ve been t-tramping around all night too, if I know you.”

“No, he slept through the whole thing.” Darcy kicks him affectionately in the ankle. Matt nudges her foot back to where it was, and knocks his knee against hers. “And I’ve come up with something you can do to start making it up to me.”

Matt tips his head. “That sounds ominous.”

“Psh, it’s nothing bad, I promise.” She props her chin in one hand. “Let me do your nails when you’re done eating.”

For some reason, Jen starts hacking on her coffee. Matt swallows his mouthful of French toast, and then sighs his _why am I friends with this person_ sigh. Still, his knee doesn’t shift away from hers, so Darcy counts that a win.

“Fine,” he says. “No yellow.”

“You’re the _bestest_.”

Jen shakes her head, cleans her coffee spill, and leaves the room, muttering about “ _weirdest friends in existence_.”  Darcy doesn’t listen. She picks through her small collection of nail polish (in a _very_ convenient little box, sitting on the kitchen counter) instead. “So. Mesmerized Blue or Aqua Lily?”

“I have to choose?”

“Of course you do.”

Matt Kermit-laughs. “Of course I do. Um. The first one?”

“And that’s why you’re my favorite, Matthew.” Darcy grabs one of his hands, spreading his fingers on the table. Matt goes still under her touch, as if startled. Then he smiles, and it’s one of his teasing smiles, the ones he uses on women in bars and in study groups and wherever else he wants.

“I’m your favorite, huh?”

“Don’t let it go to your head. And Jesus, keep your hand flat, I’ve told you this a million times.”  

She’s through three fingers and starting to work up the courage to ask him about his face— _and no more ‘I fell down the stairs,’ punky, because it’s not flying anymore_ —when Matt says, “You’re my favorite too, you know.”

Darcy fumbles the nail brush. Thankfully, the thing falls right onto the paper napkin she’s jury-rigged to catch excess polish, and not on Matt’s hand. He’s doing that dumb ridiculous completely unhelpful thing with his face that makes you think he means every single word he says, and it’s not doing wonders for her heart rate. “Don’t say that near Foggy, he’ll be jealous.”

Something tightens around the edge of his mouth. Matt puts his free hand on the back of her wrist, resting the pads of his fingers over the tattoo of the tundra swan. Darcy looks at his hand, and then up at his face. Her mouth goes dry and her stomach does that weird horrible twisting thing, all at once, and she curses herself, because she’s supposed to have trained that out of herself years ago. “You both mean a lot to me,” he says. “Both you and Foggy. More than I can ever—ever actually say.”

“Matt—”

“And that’s not ever going to change,” he says. Darcy closes her mouth. “No matter what, it’s not going to change. Just—promise me that you’ll remember that. All right?”

Oh, Matt. She covers his polish-free hand with hers, and squeezes. “Yeah.” Her voice breaks again. “Yeah, I promise.”

She finishes his nails in silence, but it’s not awkward at all.

.

.

.

The coffee shop on 43rd and 10th opens at the ungodly hour of four am. Wesley doesn’t arrive until eleven, because his morning meeting goes late, and he has to change shoes after stepping into a puddle of mixed ash and gasoline from the hollow carcass of Veles Taxi headquarters. The Russians, he’s pleased to find, are truly no longer a problem. It’s not that he doubted the effectiveness of Mr. Fisk’s solution—explosives act as both deterrent and exterminator, after all, and he has more than enough experience with both halves of that particular coin—but the speed with which it’s been done impresses him. Caution is always warranted, but decisiveness: that has its place, too.

He orders black coffee, because he refuses to say Americano, and the barista, a girl with hair that sticks up out of her head like a porcupine’s needles, gives him a considering once-over before informing him that the Americano tastes better with the hazelnut creamer, “don’t let that ape over there tell you anything different.” The ape—the other barista—scoffs, but affectionately. It’s nice to see there are still parts in the city, especially in the scattered and cancerous remains of what had been Chelsea, that has some genuine humor and humanity to it. He puts four dollars in the tip jar (hundred-percent tip) and then sets up shop at a table near the back, where he can see those coming in, but can’t be easily found. His files from the Bishop matter are still up on the screen, which annoys him. He should have been careful enough to shut all the documents behind their firewalls before setting his computer on sleep-mode. Lewis’s photo is still open, even. Jesus.

According to his contacts in the 34th, Lewis and Brigid O’Reilly have managed to get in touch. It’s lamentable, especially considering Oslo’s failures in preventing it, but in regards to the Bishop case, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The key in removing the Goodmans from their operation—and from the Japanese, which is a very close second—is smearing them in the eyes of the public, and this, he’s content to let Lewis do for him. The story will go ahead in the _Bulletin_ , the Bishop and Goodman names will be raked through the mud, and not even the yakuza will be willing to associate with the Goodmans after that. If she manages it, the Bishop case, alongside the Healy matter, will start putting Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis on the map in a much different way than they’ve been placed previously—which, to be quite frank, he’s more than a little interested in seeing.

The Cardenas woman is a different story, but there’s not much to worry about there. One old woman, and the least dangerous of the trio, Nelson, looking into it. He makes a mental note to keep an eye on Page, just in case, but for now, he’ll leave it alone.

No, it’s the fact that Lewis had recognized Nobu—or, at least, recognized his pseudonym—that is the true issue here. He’s not been able to find any evidence that she’s ever had contact with the yakuza, no reason for her to have any knowledge at all on the subject. And yet she knows the name of the _shateigashira_  of that very particular, very secret sect. There’s no evidence she’s one of the mutants that were causing so much trouble a few years ago, even if her father remains unidentified and thus unknowable. Which means either she uncovered something in the course of her investigation into the Bishop case—unlikely, as he’s followed her trail and found nothing—or someone told her.

There’s no one she’s met with who ought to be able to give her that level of intelligence. He’d toyed with Ben Urich as a possibility, but the man’s last article on the yakuza was in 2003; the delicacy of the current patchwork of first- and second-generation Americans and native Japanese that layers through the boroughs right now would be beyond him. She’s met with no moles, run into no young punks looking to show off in front of a beautiful woman. Aside from the incident with Goodman’s hired thugs, she’s clean.

Something pricks at the back of his mind about that. Wesley closes down the graduation photo—he’s been staring at it blankly for the past fifteen minutes, not seeing it at all—and swipes over to the statement. He’d been inclined to take it on face value, at first, but he’s done with Lewis surprising him. The systemic brutality of the wounds inflicted on Goodman’s men had had all the hallmarks of the masked dumbass running around making royal idiots of the Russians, and since the woman had reported that she’d never seen him, he’d dismissed it. But...

He thinks of the meeting, of the flash of teeth from Lewis at the sight of Goodman and his son. He’d expected a breeze, and found a hurricane. A woman like Darcy Lewis would be more than willing to lie to the police about an encounter with a ruthless vigilante.

Wesley taps his pen against the tabletop. Suddenly, he remembers his coffee. It’s still warm. The barista was right; the hazelnut creamer does compliment this bean nicely. He makes a note of it.

He would be inclined to give her surveillance over to the Japanese for investigation, especially considering this new wrinkle, but with the incoming project they have on their hands, they would never be able to give it the usual sort of attention a matter like this requires. Madame Gao might have been willing to look into it, if not for the sudden catch-up game she needs to play now that the Russians are out of the picture. And Leland…well. Best not to consider Leland. To be entirely honest, he wouldn’t trust any of them—the yakuza, Madame Gao, or Leland—with a matter such as this one, especially after the utter failure of Vladimir and Anatoly. No, this requires a personal touch.

He’ll set aside some time, add some manpower to the operation. And who knows—if he plays this right, they might come out of it with another lawyer on their payroll.

Wesley sips his coffee, and nods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wesley, you're a shit. I love you, but you're a shit.


	8. The Devil's In The Details

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: discussion of intimate partner abuse, discussion of past assault, discussion of gang violence, discussion of past rape, discussion of violence/assault/stalking, mentions of alcoholism, and sniper rifle shenanigans (someone gets held at gunpoint). 
> 
> It's 2am and though I've scanned through it, I haven't actively quadruple-checked everything. I'll fix it in the morning if I find something!
> 
> This is the first half of the episode _Stick_. Like I said last chapter, the word count (thanks partially to Darcy, partially to Matt, partially to Stick, and possibly to my own masochism) expanded far beyond what one chapter could hold, so I've split _Stick_ into two parts: this chappie, The Devil's In The Details and the next chapter, Revelations 12:9. I don't foresee having to split an episode into two chapters again, but who knows, I might do it just to even the chapter count out from fifteen. (I have a thing against odd numbers.)
> 
> Enjoy, lovelies!

“So let me get this straight,” says Oppie. She tugs her hair back up out of her face, all the braids tying back neatly with a single hair tie. Darcy wants to kill her. Darcy has maybe half the hair that Oppie has (seeing her without cornrows is a fucking miracle of ‘fro) and she needs three hair ties to keep it from breaking free and taking over the world. More on humid days. “You want me to take in a woman I’ve never met—”

“A nurse. With good references.” Does a suspected terrorist count as a reference? She’s not sure. Somehow she doesn’t think Oppie will approve.

“—and leave her in one of my family’s houses upstate without supervision—”

“She’d be totally supervised. Long-distance supervision is a thing.”

“—because someone kicked the shit out of her, but for some reason you’re _not_ reporting this to the police—”

“You know as well as I do that the police aren’t always the best people to bring into a case of intimate partner abuse.” Oppie doesn’t have a witty retort for that. She blows out air sharply through her nose, and gulps half her cappuccino in one go. “Besides, she doesn’t want to report it. Respect the victim’s choices, Oppie.”

“Don’t parrot my own shit back at me, Darce.”

“Look.” Darcy fights the urge to make faces at the screen. Skype’s never cooperated very well in the office, or Oppie’s for that matter, and the chance that the video feed will freeze on a hella awkward face is too high for her to dare. “She’s a friend, okay? It’d only be for a week or two, until the guy leaves town on his tour with the Peace Corps or whatever the fuck he’s doing. Personally I’m hoping he gets run over on a rainy night in Uganda, but that’s just me.”

“This guy works for the Peace Corps and still beat the shit out of his girlfriend?”

“Oppie, please. You’ve been at this for way longer than me. This sort of thing shouldn’t surprise you anymore.”

“The day humanity ceases to depress me is the day I retire permanently from the world.” Oppie runs her hands over her face, and sighs. “Fine. I’ll talk to my brother, see if he’s okay with it. I should have something for you in a couple of days. Unless she needs to be somewhere sooner.”

“No, she’ll be okay until Friday.” Darcy pops off finger-guns. “You’re awesome, Ophelia. Seriously, you’re the best. They should write sonnets and rhapsodies about you.”

“Spoken word or perish, oh Padawan mine. I have to go, end-of-the-day meetings.” She narrows her eyes. “Those boys doing right by you?”

“Of course they are. They’re my boys.” Darcy waggles her fingers. “I have to make a call of my own anyway. You’re the hostess with the mostest, Oppie.”

Oppie rolls her eyes, and cuts the call. Since that’s typical Oppie, Darcy just smiles as she shuts her computer, and leans away from the desk. Her fractured rib gives an unhappy squeeze, and she yips in spite of herself. On the other side, Matt lifts his head from his arms, sucking in a deep breath as if she’s woken him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just my rib.” She makes herself smile. “They tell you how long it takes for bones to heal, at the hospital, but they don’t tell you how irritating it is. I feel like this should be fixed by now.”

“It’s only been a few weeks. Give it more time.”

Words burn on her lips— _you’re one to talk; I haven’t seen you without bruises in months_ —but she bites her tongue before they can escape. Which, as anyone would have been able to guess, is like…the least Darcy-ish move ever. Matt should appreciate her, goddammit. “Just hurts,” she says finally, and yanks open one of her drawers, searching for the Advil. “Did I wake you up?”

“I wasn’t asleep.” This is such a lie that she doesn’t even bother to call him on it, just drawls out an “uh- _huh_ ” that for some reason makes his ears go red under his hair. It’s adorable, and she hates herself. She’d been doing so well with the not-noticing-how-cute-Matt-is thing, up until he’d scared the shit out of her. Also with being able to keep her organ-based gymnastics under control. Apparently, the only thing Matt Murdock needs to do to turn her well-kept promises into dust is tell her she’s his favorite.

Which, admittedly, in a teeny-tiny part of herself which is most certainly _not_ the majority, kind of makes her stupidly happy. But first of all, she’s much too badass to acknowledge that, ever; secondly, she has a sinking feeling that being happy about stuff like that is a betrayal of Foggy and their trio, somehow; and third, she’s kind of mad at herself for it. Also at Matt, for not picking up his goddamn phone.

Mostly at herself, though.

“What was that about?” he asks, and Darcy jolts out of reverie. “It sounded kind of serious.”

“Friend of a friend had her ass kicked last week, and needs somewhere to lay low for a while. Oppie owes me for bailing her out that one time, so I figured I’d collect.”

“I never knew you bailed Oppie out of jail.”

“Technically it wasn’t jail, it was just the drunk tank, and the charges were dismissed when the cops realized that the breathalyzer was freaking out because of mouthwash instead of alcohol consumption. She put herself between a guy and his boyfriend one time, and he pressed charges. Wasn’t pretty.”

Matt makes a considering noise. “I see.”

 “If you’re that tired you should just go home, Mattster.” She presses her hand over her rib again—it’s been bothering her since the night in the hospital—and then takes as deep a breath as she can manage before collecting her papers up. “Seriously.”

Matt tugs his glasses off and rubs at his eyelids with his thumb and forefinger. He’s kept the nail polish, bless him. Out in the main office, Darcy hears the door open. It’s Foggy—she can tell by the rhythm of the steps and the way the door shuts, sharply, because Foggy can never just _shut_ a door, he always has to kick it—but he either doesn’t notice they’re here or doesn’t want to bother them, because in the next few second she hears the door to his office snap shut as well. “I want to finish going over this tonight. We need something for Mrs. Cardenas, we can’t just leave her hanging.”

Darcy crosses around behind his desk, and sets her hand on the back of his chair, leaning forward so she can see his braille reader. She’s tried to teach herself braille once or twice, because the idea of being able to read with your fingers is so fascinating to her, but she’s never really succeeded. “Find anything?”

“No.” How he’s managed to get the Tully files into braille so quickly she has no idea, but Darcy knows better than to ask at this point. “Brett was right, a lot of it is just on the right side of ordinance. Nothing we could actually pursue.” He lifts his hand to his eyes again. “I have a headache.”

“So do I.” And her ribs hurt. And her feet, from her heels. Her brain feels swollen, she’s been thinking so hard. Outside, the sun is just starting to set. “I’m gonna take a walk. I’d tell you to come, but I think it’d be better if you just, y’know. Nap until I get back.”

“No, I can come.”

“I’m fine going on a walk around the block by myself, Matt.” She hesitates, and then drops a kiss on his hair, because even if he can be depressingly Catholic and enormously irritating and she’s still kind of mad at herself for caring so much, he’s still Matt and she does love him. “I just need to be on my own for a bit. I’ll take my phone with me, and stay in full view of passing cars at all times. No alley trips for me, I promise.”

To his credit, Matt doesn’t argue with her. He doesn’t flinch when she touches him, either, which is indescribably awesome. “Okay.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Darcy.”

She hooks her purse over her shoulder. “Hm?”

Matt hesitates. Then he shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says. “I’ll tell you later. Don’t worry about it.”

She frowns, but nods. “Okay. I’ll be back.”

“Be safe.”

Foggy’s door is still closed when she slips out into the main room, and Karen’s desk is depressingly empty. Karen’s been wandering off to more and more secret meetings lately, and Darcy hasn’t yet figured out how to ask her about it. _Hey, so I think you’re meeting with Ben Urich after possibly taking an enormous payout from Union Allied to not talk about them, just so you can do the exact opposite of that, how are you doing with that?_ Because that’s going to get her a straight answer. She’ll talk to her about it tonight, she thinks. After Jen’s asleep, because she really doubts that Karen will say anything if she thinks she could be overheard.

She shoves the gun into the back of her jeans. She still doesn’t have a carry permit for it—somehow, with everything that’s happened over the past few days, it keeps slipping her mind to nag Brett into pushing one of those through the works—but she’s not stupid. If there’s any good time to attack her, it’s when she’s walking alone at twilight. The only time that could possibly be more thematic and clichéd would be if she went walking at midnight. In the rain.

_I’m looking at you, Karen Page._

For once, though, the streets around the office are quiet. Sure, she gets panhandled a few times by people left homeless by the incident or the explosions or both, and a taxi cab nearly runs her over when she jaywalks over to the nearest convenience store to pick up Advil and the _Times_ , but that’s just New York. It’s reassuring that people will approach her just to panhandle her, and isn’t _that_ the worst indicator of what her life has become to date.

(She gives them each six bucks and asks if they need anything, and one of them, the one in crumpled fatigues, presses her hand and says “God bless you, darlin’.” Which is wrong on so many levels, but makes her smile anyway.)

She’s sitting on the stoop of a brownstone which she knows for a fact is an ex-crack house and making inroads on a rocket pop when her phone buzzes. The burner, not the banana phone. She leaves the banana phone in her lap, swiping numbers around in a very old game of 2048, and answers without checking the ID. “You’d better have slept in the last twenty-four hours, Claire, because I will be very unhappy with you if I have to peel you off the linoleum in the ER.”

There’s a long pause on the other end of the line, and then Mike says, in a very dry voice, “Well, that answers the first question I had for you.”

She swipes a four the wrong way, and gets a _game over_ screen. “Oh,” she says. “Hi. You’re alive.”

“Why wouldn’t I be alive?”

“Uh, because I left you a message like four days ago and you never responded?” She tucks the phone under her ear, pressing it close with her shoulder so she can restart her game. “Nice clips you have playing on the news, by the way. They’re very, y’know, ninja-chic.”

“I tried,” says Mike, even more dryly. “Things have been busy.”

“I can imagine. Actually, no, I can’t imagine. And I don’t really want to, so don’t explain. Unless you want to, which is totally cool.” She’s babbling. Maybe she’s more tired than she thought she was. “Whatever. What brings you to my neck of the woods? So to speak.”

“Wanted to check to see if you’ve made any progress.” Darcy shuts her banana phone off, and leans back against the next step, biting off some of her rocket pop and pressing it hard against the roof of her mouth with the tip of her tongue. Still, it’s better than _I wanted to ream you out for talking to Claire._ She’ll take it.

“Not as much as I’d like. I mean, I finally managed to get in contact with Officer O’Reilly, which is awesome, and I’ve been going over her version of events from start to finish, but the whole—” she glances up and down the street once, and then lowers her voice. “—the whole yakuza thing is, like, the worst paper trail I could have ever tried to follow, ever, and I had to collate spousal rape cases from the nineties for a year. So, kudos to you for finding something even more depressing for me to read through.”

There’s a shuffling sound from the other end of the line. “What did you find?”

“Like I said, not much.” It had taken her a good hour to bully Brett out of photocopies of all cases to do with the yakuza in Hell’s Kitchen in the last five years, which according to Google is how long Hironobu Orihara has been part of Goodman and Okamura. “Orihara has been in the States for five years, and in that time there’s been an increase in yakuza activity, especially in the Kitchen. Lots of warfare between the Russian gangs and yakuza gangbangers up until about three years ago, when clashes between the two started stagnating. Mostly what the cops have been finding lately is clashes between individual ‘bangers rather than all-out bust-ups between big-name gangsters, and of course there’s nothing to really tie Orihara or Goodman-Okamura to it at all.”

“Sounds like the Japanese and the Russians have a truce.”

“That’s what I was thinking. The police haven’t noticed yet because there’s been a lot of dust-ups with the Mexican and Columbian drug-runners covering it up, but the yakuza’s been pretty quiet the last few years. You know, so far as over violence goes. They’ve been tied to a lot of kidnappings and missing-person cases, though, not to mention prostitution and drug rings.” She swipes at the base of her popsicle with her tongue before it can drip cherry dye on her hand. “Before Orihara, the main man representing Okamura in Goodman-Okamura was a dude named Satsuki Nobugawa, but he never came over to the States. He did all his work long-distance. So, what I’m thinking is that Orihara and Nobugawa are the same guy, and he came over here in order to do better business.”

“Including a peace treaty with the Russians.”

“That’s what it sounds like. What do you have on your end?”

“There haven’t been many yakuza ‘bangers running around, lately. It feels like they’re preparing for something, but I haven’t been able to find out what.” Mike snarls something under his breath that might be a swearword, and Darcy cocks her head to one side.

“What’d you do?”

“Paper cut.” He curses quietly. “If Orihara has been working with Fisk, then a cease-fire with the Russians makes sense. Don’t piss in your own pool.”

“As bed-wettingly terrifying as that is.” She finishes her popsicle, and catches the stick between her teeth. “I’m going to keep going through the files I have, see if I can find any link with the Goodmans. It won’t help Kate much, but I get the feeling she more than anyone would love to see Goodman-Okamura crash and burn.”

Actually, now that she thinks about it, Kate might be able to help her. She’d had the impression, during the meeting Nobu had so gloriously crashed, that Kate had actually been _listening_ to the Japanese, instead of just hearing it. Darcy knows that Kate’s mom was a Japanese immigrant—she’d died of cancer or something when Kate was ten, before Kate had come out as trans, even—and Kate’s housekeeper is Japanese, too. Maybe Kate speaks Japanese? It would help; she doesn’t get half of the crime scene photos Brett copied for her. Kanji everywhere. So not helpful for someone who took Spanish in college.

“How is Kate?” Mike asks. “I saw that there was a story in the _Bulletin_ yesterday.”

“Yeah, they did a good job with that, didn’t they? Just the right mix of _look at these asshats_ with a healthy dash of _the cops have done fucked up._ I bought like…six copies of it to keep forever.” She blows out air. “I filed the suit last week, right after the explosions. O’Reilly’s helping me get my hands on all the evidence files that went mysteriously missing. Most of them ended up in digital graveyards, but she keeps all her files on a USB stick, so we have at least a few of her original report drafts, and the names of the people who botched the rape kit. And Kate’s friend, Callie, she filmed part of the night on her cell phone, caught some footage of Kate turning Goodman down when he hit on her. It’s grainy and hard to hear, but it’s way better than nothing.” She chews at her lip. “And, plus side, no threats from Goodman so far. Either of them, which actually surprises me, because Rich Goodman doesn’t seem the type to let things be. But, y’know. It’s a good.”

Mike’s ominously silent for a moment. For some reason, ice creeps down the back of Darcy’s neck. “Mike?”

“There have been a few stragglers.” His voice is so tight she could probably bounce a quarter off it. “I dealt with them before they came within a block.”

“You’re circling my apartment?”

“I keep an ear to the ground,” he corrects, and she’s caught between smiling and feeling slightly invaded. “They seem to have given up the past week or so, though.”

“What does _a few stragglers_ mean, Mike? Like, two? Three?”

“Twelve,” he says. “Fifteen. Maybe a few more.”

Her legs go liquid. “ _Fifteen people_ have tried to beat me up in the past month?”

“Fifteen people have decided to investigate your apartment at midnight in the past month,” Mike says, and she bites down hard enough on the popsicle stick that wood gets in between her teeth. “Maybe six more tried to tail you during the evening, but they scared off more easily.”

“So basically what you’re saying is that you’ve been stalking me.”

He laughs. “Stalking is a harsh word, I feel like.”

“Bodyguard?” She leans back against the stoop, trying to ignore the way her hands are shaking. “Protection detail? Benevolent demon?”

“That last one sounds most accurate.”

“It would have been nice if you’d actually, y’know, _told_ me you’d been following me around picking bastards off my trail. People like to know these things, Mike. If you don’t tell them, it gets more than a little creepy.” She brightens. “We should come up with a signal. If you’re following me, knock a trash can over. I’ll know it’s you, and my walks home will be _way_ less freaky. I can actually listen to music again.”

Mike’s laughing. She knows it. “I’m not knocking a garbage can over to let you know I’m there.”

“Well, gimme some sort of sign, otherwise I’ll be constantly looking at rooftops and that’ll give the game away.” Darcy frowns. “Wait, do you use rooftops? Or do you slink from shadow to shadow like some gigantic alley cat?”

“It varies.” They sit in silence for a moment. “I might have some good news for you soon, in regards to Lynch and Jenson. They’ve been out of town for the past week or two, but apparently they’ll be returning to the city in two days.”

“And you’re going to, what, wait on the tarmac for them?”

“No, their apartment building, but close enough.”

She doesn’t envy Jenson and Lynch. “What about Rich Goodman? Have you managed to get a good look at the bastard’s teeth yet?”

“His father’s stuck a bodyguard on him. It wouldn’t be difficult to deal with, but I want to learn more about his drug contacts first. He seems to get pure stuff, heroin right from the source. It’s barely cut, and that sort of drug is difficult to get your hands on without highly-placed contacts.”

“The yakuza?”

“If they’re working with the Russians, possibly. The Russians were working with the Triad, which does a lot of the drug running in the area.” He stops suddenly, and then says, “Why the interest? You’re a private lawyer, not part of the DA.”

“You said it yourself, didn’t you? You can’t exactly go to the DA with this shit. Besides, I’m the one who struck the devil’s bargain. I’ll play Faust to your Mephistopheles, or Ciel to your Sebastian, or whatever other awkward metaphor I can make that doesn’t make us sound like a pair of dudes that most people seem to think were super gay for each other. I’ll come up with something eventually. Why aren’t you lecturing me for talking to Claire?”

Mike goes quiet again. “It’s not my business. Besides, the Russians aren’t after her anymore, so.”

“Well, that’s an about-face if I ever heard one.” She tucks the popsicle stick into the back pocket of her jeans, and then gets to her feet. “You’re really sure they won’t try to hurt her again?”

“They know better.” She’s starting to realize that Mike has different voices. There’s his Vigilante voice, which is dark and husky and growly and basically the stuff that Batman movies are made of; his Near-Human voice, which is still dark and husky and obviously disguised but lighter, somehow, more playful; and then his Don’t Fucking Ask Me That voice, which is basically a Batman that’s smoked for decades and earned some throat cancer in the bargain. This is the Vigilante voice, and it makes the hair on her arms prickle uncomfortably.

“Good. Because if they tried, I’d probably have to go all ninja on them myself.”

The Vigilante voice fractures into pieces. “You should probably find a self-defense instructor. If the Goodmans come after you when I’m distracted by something else, it could be an issue.”

“I told you I bought a gun. Besides, I’ve been being careful. And where in my life do you see room for self-defense courses? The answer is nowhere,” she says, before he has a chance to reply. “Just so you know.”

“Darcy.”

“I’ll be fine, dude. Don’t worry about me, seriously.” Ah, shit. It’s getting darker; she needs to head back to the office. “Anything else for me? I have to get back to work.”

Mike’s quiet for a time. Then he clears his throat, and if she didn’t know better, she’d say he sounds awkward. Like, lost puppy awkward. “You haven’t asked about the bombings.”

“Why would I ask about the bombings?”

He scoffs. “The news has been pretty explicit about what they think I might have done. Just thought you were the type to ask.”

“Mike, you might be one scary-ass motherfucker, but if I thought you’d blown up four buildings and taken potshots at cops the same night, then I wouldn’t have answered the phone in the first place.”

“You thought I was Claire,” says Mike. He’s lighter, now, much closer to the Nearly-Human voice, and it’s…well, it’s nice. No, she doesn’t have the tiniest little bit of a crush on a masked vigilante, _shut up, brain._ Now at least she can understand why Karen’s ears were red, so long ago. “When you answered.”

“What are you talking about? I have no idea what you’re talking about. You speak lies.”

“I have to go,” he says. “Tell me if you find anything in those files.”

“I’ll masking-tape my window just for you, big guy,” she says, and she swears she hears a door slam in the moment before he hangs up.

.

.

.

She lets Foggy walk her home, so sue her. The idea that people have been following her around and possibly trying to invade her house at ass o’clock at night is highly unsettling, and as awesome as she is (and as little help as she knows Foggy would probably be in a fight) it’s reassuring to have someone walking next to her. He gets a little weirded out by how often she looks over her shoulder (“Lewis, you sure you’re okay? You’re twitchy. Like, rabbit on speed and a cocktail of Tour de France steroids twitchy.”) but he doesn’t push, which is why she loves Foggy. Seriously, she _loves_ Foggy, so, so much, and she doesn’t think she’s ever going to be able to explain how much her boys mean to her. Not in this lifetime, or the hypothetical next.

She gets up on tiptoe and hugs him hard, careful to angle herself away from the deep cut on his side. Foggy hugs her back, and she can see the questions on his face when she pulls away. Still, all he says is, “Tell Jen I said hi,” and all _she_ says is “Don’t tell Karen she’s Chewbacca again,” which breaks the tension nicely. Foggy pinches her in the hip (asshole; he knows that’s basically the only spot she’s ticklish) and then heads back to the staircase.

Jen’s still out. So’s Karen, for that matter; Darcy has a feeling that she’s meeting with Ben Urich, or doing _something_ with Ben Urich anyway. She calls Brigid O’Reilly again, and leaves a message (“Hey, uh, just to let you know, just…be careful, okay? People have been bugging me and I don’t want them to bug you too. Uh, sorry I called while you were on shift. …bye.”) and Jen (“Can we get a pit bull? I like the idea of a pit bull in the house when we come home. Is that a thing that could happen?”) before setting herself up on the couch with her bottle of Bailey’s and her tub of mint chip ice cream, the one she only uses in emergencies.

She’s really not sure why it’s hitting her so hard _now_ , how many people are trying to hurt her. She shouldn’t be surprised, she thinks, staring at the telenovela playing on the TV. She’s doing the right thing, she knows that—Kate needs her, and she wants to see this through, she does, she _needs_ it—but she’s not entirely sure that she’s doing it for the right reasons. It feels like a worm under her skin, the doubt, itching away at her muscles and nibbling on her tendons.

 _Justice or revenge_. Jedi or Sith, she thinks, and chokes on a laugh. Is she doing this, all of it, because she wants to see the Goodmans behind bars, or is she doing it because she wants them to suffer the way Kate did, because she wants them to pay for what they did to her, Gilgamesh’s justice, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?

Darcy sips at the Bailey’s, and then chokes on it, staring at the bottle. “Jesus.” She looks like her fucking mother. She’s _not_ her mother. She’s not the sort of person who drinks when she’s scared or when she’s depressed or when she doesn’t know what to do. The bottle feels like a snake in her hand, winding tight around her wrist. “I’m not my mother,” she says aloud, because it feels truer when she can hear it. “I’m not Lorna.”

She dumps the Bailey’s down the toilet and throws the bottle through her window and into the alleyway. The noise it makes when it smashes feels like a release.

She doesn’t tape the window. The door opens at about ten o’clock, and it’s kind of sad that she can recognize the sound of Karen’s heels over Jen’s. Karen wears snazzier shoes than Jen does, ones with thinner, higher heels, and the noise is sharper. It’s like she stabs the floor every time she takes a step. Karen’s muttering under her breath when she sticks her head into the living room, her hair swaying around her face. “Hey,” she says. “I’m gonna take a shower, okay?” Then she sees the ice cream, and the telenovela, and her eyebrows go up. “Wait, are you okay?”

Darcy legit has no idea how to answer that, so she shrugs. Karen looks at the half-empty ice cream carton, and then peels her shoes off (she loses four inches when she does it, and somehow she looks strangely human in bare feet) and drops down onto the couch next to Darcy. “Ice cream,” she says, and Darcy hands over her spoon and her carton. Karen wrinkles her nose at how melted the ice cream is getting, but scrapes some up anyway. “So?” she asks, and Darcy looks away from the telenovela. “I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you in major mope mode. You look like a country song.”

“ _I ran over my dog with my broken pick-up truck after my lady left me and my house was taken by the repo men_ ,” Darcy says, in a twangy voice that’s nothing like hers. Karen’s lips twitch. She takes another bite of ice cream. “Do you ever feel like you’re just—doing something because it’ll make you feel better, and not because it’s right?”

“All the time,” Karen says, without hesitation. “I think that’s how you know that you’re not crazy, thinking that sort of thing. Because if you’re still sane enough to wonder if you’re working for justice or revenge, you know that you have the capacity to differentiate between the two. Because sometimes they’re fucking twins.”

Something that’s been knotted tight in her throat since her conversation with Mike unwinds. Darcy sighs, and tips over to lean her head against Karen’s shoulder. Karen puts the thing of ice cream back on the coffee table and crooks her fingers, tugging them lightly through Darcy’s hair the same way she pets Darla. Darcy closes her eyes for a moment. Then she swallows. “How long have you been working with Ben Urich?”

Karen’s hand goes still against her scalp. She hears her swallow. Then Karen starts finger-combing her hair again, slower this time. “How did you know?”

“Karen, honey, I love you, but you can’t lie worth shit. It’s like watching a baby try to drive a car.” Darcy leans her head back, just a little. She can see the underside of Karen’s jaw, the shadows her hair casts on her throat. “I thought you took money from Union Allied not to talk about it anymore.”

“Technically, I won’t be the one talking about it. Ben will be.” Karen heaves a shaky sigh. “I thought—when I heard you were meeting with Ben, I thought you might have guessed. But I didn’t—I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I promised I wouldn’t.”

“No, it’s okay.” Darcy lifts her head from Karen’s shoulder, shifting so she can look her in the eye. “Look at me, okay? I am one hundred percent okay with the idea of you driving a stake up Union Allied’s ass, any way you fucking want. What do you think I’m doing with the Goodmans?”

Karen searches her face. There’s the flash of the tigress again, in the back of her eyes where most people can’t see it. Then she nods once, and Darcy settles again, shifting her head so her glasses aren’t digging into her temple. “You’re being safe?”

“As safe as I can be. What about you? I’ve seen all those files you have on your desk, don’t think I haven’t noticed.” Karen’s voice tightens. “Is there something going on with the Goodmans that you haven’t told us?”

“I think they’re part of the yakuza,” Darcy says, and the knot gets looser, puddling in the base of her throat. “I don’t know if they’re associated with Union Allied or not, but I think—there’s something bigger going on with them. I feel like I’m on the right track, but I don’t know where I’m going to end up. It’s really fucking uncomfortable, actually. And the Goodmans are making it worse because I don’t know if they’re going to attack me again, and, y’know, I don’t—” she swallows. “I never told you guys this, but like—they said they’d hurt you, if I kept going. You and Matt and Foggy and Jen. They said—”

_Just step up behind him on a street corner and push. The other one, well. Mugging gone wrong, don’t you think? And the Page woman, Jen Walters—well, they’re the easiest of all._

“Darcy,” says Karen, but Darcy shakes her head.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that. You’ll worry for no good reason now.”

“I feel like this is a very good reason to be worried.” Karen turns on the sofa, crossing her legs and hooking her hair behind her ears. She searches Darcy’s face again. “You’ve kept that quiet this whole time?”

“You think I’d still be investigating if I didn’t think they were bullshitting me? Now that the article’s out they can’t do a damn thing. You saw how TMZ snapped it up. Kate’s going to do an interview with them on Saturday, and, y’know, I’ll go with her so they’ll hear about it all, but I just—” She shakes her head. “It’s okay. I have—a friend, who’s been keeping an eye out. He’s helped me. He’s kept us safe, y’know?”

Karen pitches her voice low. “The devil?”

“He didn’t blow up those buildings, Karen.” Darcy catches Karen’s hands, and holds them. “He’s—I dunno. He’s nice, in a weird way. He’s—” her tongue trips, because she thinks the word _familiar_ , and she can’t think about that right now. She _won’t_. “He’s been helping a lot.”

“He did save you, then.”

“He’s been helping me look into Goodman-Okamura.”

Karen closes her eyes. “Have you told Foggy?”

“Are you kidding? No. He’d freak out. He thinks the devil blew up Hell’s Kitchen, remember?” She shakes her head. “Have you told Foggy about Ben Urich?”

“No. I didn’t—I didn’t want to get anyone involved.”

“Jesus. I feel like we should institute an honest policy in the office from now on. Post it on the wall and everything. _Tell everyone everything, except when it might make Foggy uncomfortable._ ”

Karen laughs. “Right? It’d make things easier.”

“Damn straight.” She leans her shoulder against the couch, and folds her hands in her lap. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“Done,” says Karen, and when Jen comes home at two am, exhausted and buzzing from too much coffee, she finds them still talking on the couch, the telenovela marathon forgotten in the background.

.

.

.

“I can’t believe it.” Claire sounds almost hollow, as if the shock has scraped her personality out by the roots and dumped it into the East River. “You just…found me a house.”

Darcy shakes her head. Then she remembers Claire can’t actually see her, since she’s on the other side of the city, and makes a noise instead. “No, I didn’t find you a house. I asked a friend, who asked her brother, who is currently teaching in the Czech Republic, to see if there was a house you could babysit while they’re both working. And it turns out there is, up near Albany. It’s on a main street, so you don’t need a car, and they’re used to seeing city people rent places in that area.”

She’s ominously silent. Darcy clears her throat. “I’m not saying it’s a _fabulous_ house. It’s like…way out in the middle of nowhere, so you might need to knock some skulls together to get decent internet. And there’s not a lot to do out there, compared to the city. But, y’know, it’s away. In case you want it.”

“Darcy.” Somehow Claire manages to say _you shouldn’t have_ and _I’m going to fucking kill you_ and _what am I supposed to say_ all at once without saying any of it. “Jesus.”

“Hey, I told you I’d look for a place. Oppie owes me a favor and I cashed it in. Besides, I figured you’d want to, y’know, get away from the city for a while. Even if the Russians are gone.”

Claire sighs, deeply. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I did. Now shut up and take the offer before I give it to some other chick I know who’s been kicked in the teeth by the Russian mob in the past month.” Claire huffs. Darcy knocks open the door to Mug Shots with her hip, and sighs. “Shit, she’s late.”

“Who’s late?”

“One of my clients. I was supposed to meet her to go over what’s going to happen when we meet with the judge in a week. _I’m_ late, so it figures that _she’s_ late. God, I didn’t have to run here in three inch heels, _fuck_. I could have fucking _walked_.”

“Sucks for you, bro,” says Claire. Darcy covers the mouthpiece of her banana phone (she’s given up using the burner for Claire, after the Mike fiasco) and orders an Americano and a scone. “I still can’t believe you found me a fucking _house_.”

“Like I said, it’s not a house, it’s a babysitting job for a house in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere. You’ll probably hate it, city girl.” Kimmy, the barista with the spiked hair, waggles her eyebrows. Darcy rolls her eyes back, and steps aside to let the next person in line order. “Plus side, there aren’t any cats for you to turn up your nose at. There might be a dog in the neighborhood though. I don’t know if you’re allergic to dogs.”

“I’m not allergic to dogs.”

“Well, good for me, I found you an allergy-free place to live, then.”

“Shut up,” says Claire, and Darcy laughs. “It’s just so weird. I have somewhere to go. I mean, I don’t need to run off anymore—I went grocery shopping this morning, and it was so trippy. Having perishable food in my fridge again, first of all, because you don’t want to know what happened with the stuff in my fridge when I hid, it was seriously disgusting. But like…having a place to keep food. Being able to go out and _buy_ food. It was really…weird.”

“I mean, considering everything, it sounds like that that would probably be the trippiest thing that would ever happen in your life. Meeting Mike can’t come close.”

“Dragging Mike out of my dumpster to stitch up in the middle of the night doesn’t even compare,” Claire agrees gravely.

“He seriously landed in your dumpster?”

“Russians kicked the crap out of him. Seems to be a trend around here.”

There’s something odd in Claire’s voice, some still-raw hurt, that scrapes unsettlingly close. Darcy passes her phone from one ear to the other, collecting her Americano from the counter. “You okay there?”

“I’m fine. Nothing that a few days binging on Bourne movies won’t fix.” Claire sighs. “I just—there was a moment. And then there was the shattered remains of a moment, which, y’know, cut like a wicked bitch. But cuts heal.”

Darcy turns that over in her head for a moment. Then she says, “What, is he a shitty kisser?”

The noise Claire makes is the most gorgeous, hilarious thing on this side of the century, and Darcy is hella pleased with herself that she managed to get her to make it. “What the _hell_.”

“I was just wondering, ‘cause, y’know, you never know with those dark and dangerous types, they might be hiding a total virgin interior under all the badassery.”

“Oh my god.” Claire makes the noise again, and then starts to laugh. “Oh my _god._ ”

“Seriously, Claire, you can’t leave me hanging with that. Is Mike a kissing virgin? Ugh, is he one of those guys that has like…a prickly cactus tongue? I met one in undergrad and it was seriously the most terrible fucking thing, so uncomfortable, the worst thing to find out in the middle of a very nice bout of sexual tension, it completely takes all the wind out of your sails—”

“It was fine,” Claire says, still laughing. “It was nice.”

“Just nice?”

“I’m so not answering that.”

“So it was awesome. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You’re the worst.”

“Be glad you never met sixteen-year-old me. I would have totally interrogated you for _every single detail_.” Cream, sugar, and she’s good. Darcy wades through the masses to her regular table, and sets her stuff down, hooking her coat on the back of the chair. “I should probably get this shit ready before Kate gets here. Tell me if you’re gonna go up to the house, okay? I need to let Oppie know, and if you’re not going I need to do damage control.”

“Yeah. Um. Yeah, I’ll call you.” Claire pauses. “Thanks. It’s—yeah. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” She hangs up, and sets her phone on the table, leaning back to stare out the window. There’s any number of things that she should be doing—saving the interview she did with Brigid O’Reilly to the cloud, first of all—but right now she’s comfortable. She actually slept well, for once; she and Karen had dropped by Elena’s to have a real breakfast, the sort that Darcy hasn’t had since before she went into law school, complete with salsa hot enough to make the roof of her mouth melt; she has coffee and a scone, because her first check from Kate came through, so she can start paying off her monumental hospital bill; the first meeting with the judge is in a week, and they actually managed to snag Moustakas for this, which is _amazing_ in a million different ways; and, again, coffee. All in all? It’s a really fucking nice day.

Which is, of course, why she has to turn around and have it ruined.

Psycho Glasses Killer stands beside her table, hands loose by his sides, tipping his head and watching her the way a cat does a dying bird. Darcy chokes on her sip of coffee, and almost spurts it back up all over the tabletop. Thankfully, she manages to swallow before she makes a complete ass of herself. “Miss Lewis,” says Psycho Glasses Killer. “I was wondering if I might run into you. Mind if I sit?”

Darcy looks at the empty chairs around them, then up at Psycho Glasses Killer. Her mouth is made of ash. “Knock yourself out, dude,” she says, and Psycho Glasses Killer takes the chair opposite her, settling himself in a neat little sprawl with his hands folded on the table top. Mug Shots suddenly feels too small, and her gun—in her purse, _fuck_ —is very far away.

“I don’t know if I ever introduced myself,” says Psycho Glasses Killer. “I’m Wesley.”

“I don’t get a last name?”

His eyes crinkle. “That _is_ my last name.”

“Damn. I thought you might have been the Dread Pirate Roberts.” Her heart’s hammering under her breastbone, and her fingers feel shaky. When she grabs her coffee mug, though, they’re perfectly steady. “So, is there a reason you wanted to talk to me, or did you just see me and figure you’d say hi on the behalf of your malevolent overlords?”

“Six of one, half-dozen of the other.” Wesley cocks his eyebrows at her, as if she’s going to fall for it, and then leans back in his chair. “I wanted to speak to you about your investigation into Goodman-Okamura.”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“Goodman-Okamura is my employer’s business, which makes it my business.” He gives her a look. “The same way Confederated Global was my business, as your partners might have told you.”

“And the same way Union Allied is your business?” Darcy snaps. It’s a shot in the dark, but when she sees the way his hands flex against the table, she knows she’s hit home. Wesley’s face remains admirably blank, though.

“Conspiracy theorist isn’t a hat you wear well, Miss Lewis. I’d suggest exchanging it for another one as soon as possible.”

“That’s the thing about me, I don’t let other people dictate my fashion choices.” She hooks her foot around the straps of her purse, pulling it closer to her under the table. “Why Goodman-Okamura? Only I thought that you were trying to defend Rich Goodman for raping a girl in Central Park, not covering their corporate asses.”

“I’m not an attorney, Miss Lewis. Whatever the Goodmans decide to do in court, that’s their affair. In fact, I wish you luck in destroying them. I have no liking for Robert or Richard Goodman, but unfortunately duty calls.” His smile reminds her of a shark, all teeth and no humor. “There are two options for you, here, Miss Lewis. The Goodman rape case is yours, free and clear. We have no intention to interfere with that. Neither my employer nor myself relish being associated with a known rapist.”

“If you’re not here for the Goodmans, what are you here for? Did you see the newest episode of _Game of Thrones_ and think, huh, she looks like a lady who knows her Targaryens from her Tyrells?”

“As fascinating as I’m sure that discussion would be, I’m afraid we don’t have enough time.” Wesley looks genuinely disappointed. It makes her skin crawl.  “There are a lot of things I could say, you could be threatened, I would be intimidating, there would be another argument, and so on, but the gist of the matter is that if you don’t cease looking into the inner workings of the Goodman-Okamura Trading Group, things will become very…difficult, for all of us.”

“Define difficult,” Darcy says, and sips at her coffee, ignoring the way it scalds her tongue. Her heart’s pounding in her chest, hard enough to hurt, and it might be because she’s scared and it might be because she’s angry and it might be because of both. It’s probably both. Still, this is fairly unimpressive, considering the last time someone tried to intimidate her.

“Extraordinarily distasteful,” says Wesley eventually. “To a great many people.”

“Meaning, what, you’ll kill me?” Her purse is between her feet, now. She can’t exactly reach down and grab the gun while he’s watching, but she can maybe do something super-spy like and subterfuge-y. Darcy touches the edge of her banana phone, with its bright yellow case, and wonders. “Or you’ll kill someone I care about?”

Wesley actually smiles again. “You underestimate our creativity, Miss Lewis.”

“I don’t even know who your employer is.” Her palms are sweating. She reaches for her coffee cup with shaking hands. “I have no idea whose toes I’m stepping on.”

“You don’t need to know. Settle for stopping the investigation.”

She knocks her phone a little bit closer to the edge, sweeping it sideways accidentally-on-purpose, and then sips her coffee. “Sorry,” she says. “What I do on my own time is my business. Same as what I decide to do with my uterus, or who I decide to have sex with, or whether or not I spend an evening eating like an entire carton of ice cream by myself, which, news to no one, has happened. But yeah. Even if I’ve been looking into your boss’s private stuff—which, you know, since I don’t know who he _is_ , I’d in no way know that—everything I’ve done in this _supposed_ investigation is legal and above-board. So if your employer _—_ ” _the yakuza? Who’s that guy Mike mentioned, Fisk? Someone else?_ “—wants to object, he can do it himself, in person, rather than sending one of his minions to try and scare me.” She nudges her phone even closer to the edge, under cover of waving her arms around like a maniac. “We’re done here.”

Wesley doesn’t snap or snarl. In fact, he looks rather pleased. “We know that you’re aware of Hironobu Orihara’s less savory associations,” he says, and Darcy goes still. “We know that you meet with the devil of Hell’s Kitchen. We know that he protects you. He seems to have a taste for dark-haired women in distress, this mysterious masked man.  Tell me, if my associates and I escort you from this coffee shop in broad daylight, how long do you think you have before he comes for you? Six hours? Seven? There’s a lot we can do to you in that time, Miss Lewis, and none of it will ever leave a mark.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Darcy says, but her voice is trembling.

Wesley clicks his tongue. “Come on, Miss Lewis, you’re smarter than that. We have it on film, you know. We’ve known where you live since the beginning. Setting up an observer in the apartment across from yours, well, that was more than simple. We have a number of very interesting shots of your fire escape, the night you first met with the Goodmans. The most interesting thing is that he seems to do more than protect you, he seems to _trust_ you. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you know who he is.”

“Seriously, dude. I have _no idea what you’re talking about._ ”

“Don’t bullshit me, Darcy.” Wesley leans forward. “You know the masked man. You know who he is. We can make you talk, in very, very nasty ways, or you could tell us straight out. Only one option leaves you with all your fingers intact. And if you continue trying to create a distraction to draw your gun, I’d like you to know that there’s a sniper set up across the street, and if you move one inch towards your purse you’ll wind up with a bullet in the chest.”

Darcy looks down. There’s a gleaming red spot against her left breast. As she watches, it bounces once, and then vanishes.

“It’s highly unfortunate that you’ve set yourself so firmly against my employer,” he says. “You would be quite an asset, if you decided to switch sides.”

“So you’re either offering to kill me, or offering a job.” Her eyebrows go up, all on their own. “Does being Henchman Number Three get you better dental? Literally the only reason I would consider it.”

Wesley gets to his feet, pushing his chair back to its place beneath the table. “It was worth a shot, I suppose. You have twenty-four hours to reconsider, Miss Lewis. At that point, the instruments I have in play will be set loose, and their methods are very uncomfortable.”

Kate slips into Mug Shots. Darcy can see the moment when she registers Wesley at the table, can see the way her shoulders tense and her hands bunch up into fists. “I’d go, if I were you, Mr. Wesley. My client doesn’t like you very much.”

“Think about what I said.” He takes a card from his pocket, and offers it to her. There’s only a number on it, no other information. Darcy looks at it, and then at him, and grabs her coffee cup instead. Wesley places the card in the spot of honor on the table—right in front of her—and then nods once. “It was nice speaking with you, Miss Lewis.”

“Can’t say I feel the same, minion.”

His eyes crinkle up into an odd little smile. Wesley passes Kate on her way over to the table, dipping his head as if he’s tipping his cap, but thankfully he doesn’t say anything to her. Kate takes the chair he left behind, her hands already in fists, her eyes sharp and dark. “Darcy?”

“Hm?” says Darcy, feeling slightly dizzy. Her rib hurts again. _In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you know who he is._ “Yeah?”

“Is there a reason that Goodman’s lawyer was here?”

 _If I didn’t know better, I’d say you know who he is._ “He’s not Goodman’s lawyer.”

Kate makes an impatient noise. “What was he doing here?”

Darcy looks down at the card on the table. She picks it up slowly, touching only the barest piece of it. Then she digs into her pocket, where she’s kept a lighter since she’d picked up a cigarette habit in undergrad (she mostly doesn’t smoke anymore, but still) and lights it on fire. Out on the street, she sees Wesley flash a smile at her as he waves down a cab. She waits until it’s all fallen into ash, and then scrapes the ashes into a napkin, and folds the napkin up to be tossed.

 _You know who he is_ , Wesley says in her head, and she thinks she might throw up.

_I’ll tell you later, don’t worry about it._

“Darcy?”

Darcy gets to her feet. “I’ll be right back,” she says. “I need to make a call.”


	9. Revelations 12:9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MAJOR TRIGGER WARNINGS: Description of healing wounds (knife cuts and broken ribs), description of child abuse by a parent (past, not of the speaker), mentions of alcoholism/drunkenness/major depressive disorder, discussion of murder, discussion of post-death putrefaction/decomposition, blood, misogyny (thanks, Stick), nightmares and night terrors, gun use, panic attacks (sort of), Major Angst, what is quite arguably a PTSD flashback dream, though I doubt it'd be acknowledged as such a thing by the dreamer, and discussion of murder/assassination. 
> 
> This is the chapter where things start to divert from the Netflix _Daredevil_ canon, so hold on to your butts. I wrote it mainly to a constant refrain of Drowning Pool's "Bodies" and Grayson Saunders' "Beautiful Crime." So, that should give you a decent idea of the tone. 
> 
> Revelations, 12:9  
> "The great dragon was hurled down--that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him."
> 
> I cannot tell you how many times I rewrote bits of this chapter, so hopefully it all meshes okay. 
> 
> Welcome to the Good Train _Angst._ Please note that all ink on the tickets is made of tears and the ashes of old fans.

It’s nearly three in the morning and she’s been sitting on her fire escape for a good three hours when she finally hears the clang of hands around the railing. Darcy grabs her gun from where it’s been lying next to her on the grate, holding it tight in one hand, but it’s only Mike; he heaves himself up onto the fire escape and puts up his hands, slowly. “Hey,” he says. “Hey, it’s just me.”

Something about his voice in that moment pricks at her, like it’s something she’s heard before even if he’s cast it low and gravelly. It hurts. If Wesley is right, if Mike is someone she knows, she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to make it through tonight without a full-on breakdown. ( _Bruises,_ she thinks, _a ski-hat pulled down over his eyes, all those times he fell down stairs._ ) She has to take two deep breaths and clasp her other hand around the base of her semiautomatic before she can finally lower it again. Darcy tucks it into the back of her pants, thumbing the safety on so she doesn’t accidentally shoot herself in the ass. Mike’s mouth tightens, and he settles himself next to her, crossing his legs and clasping his ankles through his boots. There’s a set to his jaw that makes her think he wants to take the gun from her, but at the same time, he doesn’t. “You called. What happened?”

She shakes her head once. Then she takes a breath, and releases it. “Wesley—Psycho Glasses Killer—offered me a job.”

_You know who he is._

_I’ll tell you later, don’t worry about it._

Mike doesn’t flinch. He just tips his head at her, and Jesus, it looks so much like how Matt does it that it makes her eyes burn. She can’t talk to Matt about this, though. She can only talk to Mike. “He—he said I could stop looking into Goodman-Okamura and take a job with them, or I could—I don’t know. He had a gun on me. He made weird threats. Like, _you have twenty-four hours before something bad happens_ type threats. You know, B-movie villain stuff. And I kind of spent most of the afternoon hiding in my bathroom throwing up because it was _so much worse_ than the alleyway and I really didn’t enjoy it. Like. At all. Can there be a rule where bad guys stop focusing on me?”

“I’m pretty sure bad guys only stop focusing on you if you stop doing good things,” Mike says. His lip is terribly split, and when he shifts on the fire escape he lets out a tight hiss of breath from between his teeth. "So in a way it’s flattering that they’re so mad.”

 _All those missed phone calls._ “Also, apparently they’ve been watching me from the next building over, so—y’know. There’s that.”

Mike tips his head again. There’s a bruise right underneath his jaw that’s shaped like a fingerprint. “If there were, there’s no one there right now.”

“How would you even know that?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

 _Well, fine, then._ “Jesus, what the hell happened to you?” She lifts a hand, and then lowers it. “Did someone hit you with a semi-truck?”

“Had a disagreement.” He shakes his head, and runs a hand over his jaw. _Verbal tics. The fidgeting habit_. _The way the corners of his mouth twist when he smiles._ “It doesn’t matter.”

“It kind of does matter.” She touches the gun again, and then nods. “Hold on. I’m gonna get the first aid kit, I’ll be right back.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I _do_ need to do that. Jesus Christ, you look fucking terrible.” He holds himself stiffly, and sets one hand on the grating as if he’s ready to bolt. Darcy sighs. Her heart hurts. _Mike can’t be Matt. Matt is blind._ And Mike wears a mask that hides his eyes. “I won’t try to take your mask off, though I have absolutely no doubt that your face looks awful. I promise, okay? I won’t take your mask. Just your shirt.”

His lips twitch. Then he winces, because the scab on his lower lip has split, and blood wells up on the cut. “Just my shirt, huh.”

“You think I’m going to pass up the chance to ogle a superhero in the raw? Please.” She wedges her window open, and sticks her feet through onto her bed. “Just wait there, okay? I’ll be back.”

Mike nods once, and turns his face away from her.

 _I’ll tell you later,_ she thinks. _Don’t worry about it._

Jen’s light is still on underneath her door, so Darcy creeps by it and into the bathroom to grab their first aid kit. (Super-mega-awesome ultra-buffed first aid kit, because both Darcy and Jen like to chop bits off their hands while cutting vegetables, okay, it’s a thing.) She slinks back into her room, prodding Darla out with her foot, and then clambers up onto the bed, poking her head through the window. “Come on,” she says. “I can’t do it out there, there’s no light.”

Mike hesitates. Then he follows her into her room. It’s very, _very_ strange, a vigilante in all-black sitting on her desk chair, but it’s, y’know. What her life is now. Darcy shuts the window and pins her dragon tapestry back over it. Then she drags her footstool over to the desk and sits, cocking her eyebrows at him. “Come on, punky. Shirt, off.”

She says it without thinking, and she flinches when she realizes what she’s just done. She’s only ever called Matt punky. After a long breath, Mike peels his shirt up and over his head, wincing and clenching his teeth as he does it, and she takes the split second when his face is hidden behind his shirt to close her eyes and curse herself. _I have to be wrong,_ she thinks, but Wesley’s voice won’t get out of her head. _He can’t be Matt. He can’t._  

_I’d say you know who he is._

_I’ll tell you later. Don’t worry about it._

Mike is a marvel of muscles and a patchwork of scars. Some of them are still pink and raw, some are older; one still has stitches in it, and she’s pretty sure she recognizes Claire’s neat, clean work even if she’s never seen Claire’s stitches before in her life. She ghosts her fingertips over the top of it, and somehow Mike doesn’t flinch. “What’s this from?”

“Glass cut. Russians.”

“Jesus.” She touches another mark, just below his collarbone. It’s healing, the stitches are gone, but it still looks puckered and painful. “What about this one?”

“Lucky bastard with a knife.”

“You need body armor,” she tells him, trying to keep her voice from shaking. Darcy opens the first aid kit. “Seriously, like…all of the body armor.”

“That’s what Claire said,” says Mike, and leans forward so she doesn’t have to reach to dab at him with cotton balls. “But it’d slow me down. It’s not like I have a magic hammer or a special shield or anything.”

“No,” she says, “just your X-ray hands. Claire said something about that, told me I should ask you.” She eyes the mark on his jaw again, and then presses a cotton ball to the top of the isopropyl alcohol bottle, tipping it just enough to wet the cotton down without spilling it all over her desk. “If you can see through my shirt, we’re done here, dude.”

He laughs, silently. _No._ “No, it’s not—I don’t have X-ray vision.”

“Then what do you have?” She touches the cotton ball to the fresh cut on his ribcage, one that looks more like the splitting flesh of a rotten fruit than anything, and though he takes a sharp breath, he doesn’t react otherwise. “Because I’ve seen you fight, remember. It’s like—I don’t know. It’s like you know what’s coming. Like you have eyes in the back of your head.”

Mike’s quiet for a long time. Darcy throws the first cotton ball in the trash, and then wets down another one. He licks his lips. “It’s more like—everything’s enhanced, I guess. I can hear things, smell things. I know—I can tell you that there’s a cat three blocks away with kittens, in a cardboard box behind a dumpster near that Indian restaurant. They’re only a few days old. The guy who’s been watching your apartment left four days ago, but the empty apartment he was using still smells like his aftershave and the takeout he was eating. Same thing every day, one of the soups from the Chinese place down the street. It’s…I don’t know.”

“So everything’s in super-hi-def for you, then.” She tugs one of the bigger Band-Aids from the box, and tears off the paper covering. “Is it always like that, or just when you put on the mask?”

He shakes his head a little. “Usually I can push it back, but yeah. It’s always there.” Mike tilts his head again, and that’s Matt all over, enough to break her heart. _You can’t be Matt, because that would mean Matt didn’t trust me. It would mean Matt’s been lying, lying for years, and I can’t—_ “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Darcy says, but even normal-person no-superpowers her can hear the way her voice snaps, the way dying fires do. “Why wouldn’t I be fine? You’re the one who had your ribs kicked in.”

Mike watches her for a second or two. Then he lets out a breath. “I don’t know. You smell like tears.”

“That’s so—” She doesn’t know what to think. That he’s invasive? That he should keep his damn nose to himself? That he can’t help it, she shouldn’t be angry at him if he can’t help it, but he _can_ help lying to her, god fucking damn it, he could have helped that years ago. “—you can seriously smell that?”

“Yeah.”

Darcy’s hands are shaking as she douses a third cotton ball. “And—and you’ve always been like this?”

“Long enough.” He reaches out, and rests the fingertips of his gloves against the back of her wrist. “Darcy, what’s wrong?”

“I’ve just—I’ve had a really shitty night, okay? Can we drop it? I don’t—”

“Darcy.”

She doesn’t think. Darcy jerks her hand away, and slams the alcohol against her desk, hard enough to spill some of it against the wood. “Matt,” she snaps back at him, “I _really don’t want to talk about this right now._ ”

They both freeze. Mike’s— _Matt’s_ lips part. Her cheeks feel hot, and her eyesight is going blurred. Darcy scrapes at her eyes with the back of her hand, and stands up sharply, stalking out of her room. The bathroom is across the hall from Jen’s room, and she shuts the door more carefully there, turning on the sink to the highest heat it can manage before propping herself against the ceramic.

She looks like shit. There are caverns under her eyes the size of the Grand Canyon, her nose is red from holding tears back, and she can’t keep her chin from fucking trembling like a six-year-old’s. She blows her nose hard enough to hurt, and then washes her face three times in quick succession, because she’s not about to fucking cry. She’s _not going to cry_. She’s just not. She’s spent all afternoon thinking about this, and she’s _not_ going to cry about it.

Her heart tumbles in her ribcage like a jester. She has a feeling that someone somewhere is laughing at her. It’s less than two minutes later when she grabs the spare Ace bandages for her ribs, and leaves the bathroom again.

She’s not sure if she’s surprised or disappointed to find that Matt is still in her room. He’s still wearing the stupid fucking ski-mask, and now that she’s said it, now that she can’t deny it anymore, the sight of the scars makes her hurt all over. “Were you ever going to tell me?” she asks, her voice hard, prodding her door shut with her foot. Darla shoots through the gap before it clicks closed, escaping to Karen and freedom. “Or were you going to just, you know, keep lying for as long as you know me?”

Matt says nothing. His lips are pressed so thin that she can’t even really see them anymore. “Darcy,” he says, and thank god that stupid dip in his voice is gone, thank god he’s decided to just speak normally, because if he’d kept trying to hold up the façade she would have punched him. She really would have. “How did you figure it out?”

“Wesley said something. Not about your identity,” she corrects, when he goes stiff as a board. “More like he’d be surprised if I didn’t know who you were. And—y’know, it made me think.” _Mike is Matt._ She breathes with it. Her heart beats with it. She’s standing close enough that she can smell the shampoo he uses, and that mouth, Jesus, she should have recognized the mouth. “I’m supposed to be smart,” she says, her voice tight. “I’m supposed to notice things about people. It’s what my job is, I’m supposed to _see_ things. But until he suggested it, it didn’t click. And it’s so fucking obvious I could scream.” She drops a handful of toilet paper onto the alcohol spill. “So, y’know, when I was worried you were _dead_ , you were out, what, beating the shit out of people?”

Matt doesn’t say anything. She looks up at the ski mask, and then down at the bandages again. “You’re the devil of Hell’s Kitchen. How the hell am I supposed to feel about that?”

“I don’t know.” He licks his lips. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not okay with sorries right now. Explanations are better.” She drops down hard on the stool, and unpins the bandage. “How are your ribs?”

He makes an impatient noise. “My ribs are fine.”

“Don’t give me that, I saw how you flinched.” Darcy judges her moment, and then pokes him hard underneath one of his bruises. The sound Matt makes when she does it breaks her heart and makes her furious, all at once. “Broken rib,” she says, and glares at him. “Lift your arms, asshole.”

He lifts his arms. She has to touch him in order to wrap his ribs, and she does it, but she’s not sure how she’s going to come through it alive. “You didn’t answer my question,” she says. “Were you ever going to tell anyone? Or were you, y’know, planning on ending up _dead_ and us finding out _then_?”

“Of course not.” There’s his temper, sparking just under the surface. Something dark and serpentine clenches close around her heart. _Yeah, be mad, Matt. I promise you I’ll be so much worse._ “Darcy, I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to be in danger, I wasn’t trying to—”

“Well, I ended up in danger anyway, because apparently I have a nose for that sort of thing.” She tugs the bandage a bit tighter than she needs to. “And it’s not just the _fucking vigilantism_ , Matt. You’re—you can see? Did you—did you lie about that, too? Can you—are you just going around with sunglasses and a cane, just to see how people—”

His hands snap closed around her wrists, squeezing just hard enough to hurt. “No,” he says. “ _No_. I didn’t lie about that.”

“But you can—goddammit, Matt, you can _smell me crying._ You can hear—Jesus, you said three blocks away, didn’t you? You can hear that far, and smell, and—Jesus Christ.” She’s shaking. “Jesus, Matt, I can’t talk to you with that thing on. Take it off.”

“Darcy—”

“ _Please_ ,” she says, and tears feel like blood against her cheeks. “Just take off the fucking mask.”

He squeezes her wrists again. Then he lets her go. Matt lifts his hands to his face, and pushes the mask up, not slowly, but not quickly either. Her lungs go flat when it’s off, and she can see the way his hair stands up from the sweat, the way his eyes are not-focused on the wall behind her. He’s very pale, and there are bruises everywhere. She wants to touch him, but if she does, she’ll break.

“You’re the devil of Hell’s Kitchen,” she says, and he turns his face towards hers. “You’ve—you’ve been following me around, picking assholes off my tail. You led me to Claire.” She takes a breath. “You’re the one who beat the shit out of those guys in the alley. And you saved my life, and Karen’s. You’ve done _all of that_ , and you _never told me._ ”

“I was going to,” he says, his voice low. For some stupid reason, her heart skips. “I was going to tell you. Tomorrow, actually. When—after I dealt with Lynch and Jenson, I was going to tell you.”

She clenches her fingers into fists. “You swear?”

“I wouldn’t lie about that, Darcy.” His eyes are hard and wet. “I don’t—like—keeping secrets.” He licks his lips. “Not from you, anyway.”

“Bullshit.” She’s choking. She can’t breathe. “You’ve kept a million secrets from me, for _years._ Not—not the devil, but—Jesus. Were you ever going to say anything? About—about what you can do, about who you are? I’ve known you for _seven years_ and you’ve _never said anything._ ”

Matt scoffs. “How was I supposed to explain it? _Hi, my name’s Matt Murdock, I can smell what you had for breakfast yesterday._ How was I supposed to say that?”

“A simple _hey, I’m a mutant_ would have been fucking nice!”

“It’s not like I was born this way!”

“So, what, you’re like an experiment?”

He clenches his teeth. “I don’t know what I am.”

For some reason, that drops gasoline on her temper better than anything else he could have possibly said. “I know what I thought you were,” says Darcy, pinning the bandage and grabbing a handful of Q-tips. “I thought you were one of the only people on the planet that would never, ever lie to me. I thought you were—I thought you were a good man, a good lawyer.” She thinks of that night, so long ago, when they’d lain in the same bed with his swollen knuckles and the smears of blood. “I thought you were my friend, Matt. That’s what I thought.”

In the dim light of her desk lamp, his eyes gleam like shards of glass. She’s never seen him cry. She’s not sure if she’ll be able to say the same, after tonight. “So?” His voice is hoarse. “What do you think now?”

She doesn’t speak for a very long time. Darcy tugs wound tape from the kit, peeling the sterile wrapping away. She wants to hurt him, for lying to her. She wants to cry. She wants to crawl into his lap, wrap her arms and legs around him, and cling on, like twining the two of them together like vines will keep him from getting up and climbing out the window with his mask and his secrets. Like it would stop him from doing whatever he’s going to do. “I think some part of me already knew that it was you,” she says, setting her hand to the back of his neck and tipping his head forward so she can tape the cut on his eyebrow. Matt holds his breath, like he’s suspended over a ravine, and she’s sawing through his ropes. “I think I understand why you didn’t say anything about your—your whatever-it-is that you can do. It hurts, but I think I understand it. And I think you meant what you said, about telling me the truth. Even if I’m _really fucking angry with you_ , that’s not something I’m going to forget.”

He closes his eyes, and the shaky sigh that escapes him tickles the hair on the back of her forearm.

“I’ve been—I’ve been thinking about this all day.” She leans back and checks his face again before pouring a bit of alcohol into a shot glass, dipping a Q-tip into it. “Whether—whether or not I can forgive you for lying.”

“Darcy—”

“Just shut up for a minute.” She blows out a breath. “My brain’s been going in circles for hours. Some—some bad metro detours all up in this. And I was—I was thinking how hypocritical it would be for me to n-not be able to forgive you, because there’s shit I’ve never told you or Foggy. Not ever. And—and I didn’t do it because I didn’t want either of you to th-think less of me.” She’s crying again. She wipes her face with the back of her wrist, and rolls the Q-tip over a cut on his cheek. “And—and Foggy, especially, he wouldn’t—he wouldn’t get it. He’s—he’s one of the gentlest people I’ve ever met, Matt. He’s just genuinely _good_ , and I don’t—I didn’t want to have him hate me.”

“Foggy would never hate you,” Matt says after a moment. “I know I never could.”

She can’t speak for a long time. Darcy throws the first Q-tip away, and grabs a second one, turning his face to the side so she can get at a cut on his temple. It feels like her insides are trembling.

“I told you—I told you that I was done running away, done backing down from shit.” She focuses on the cuts, not on his face, because if she imagines that he’s nothing but wounds, she can talk. “I don’t—I don’t know if you really noticed, considering Claire and—and everything else that was going on that night, but, y’know. I did.”

“You shoved me. I noticed.”

She doesn’t laugh. “When I was nine or ten, I lived in this neighborhood. One of the projects in Atlanta. It was—y’know, it wasn’t as bad as some parts of Hell’s Kitchen, but it was still pretty bad. Lots of gangs, lots of drugs. School was a shithole.” In spite of everything, her lips twitch. “I didn’t care much at the time. I was nine, and we’d never had much money. Trashy neighborhoods ‘r’ us.”

He seems to be holding his breath, as if reminding her that he exists will stop her talking. Darcy doesn’t mention it.

“There was—there was this boy, a few houses down from me. Eli Bletchley.” She clenches one hand into a fist on her knee. Her accent’s coming back out, after years of training it away, and she doesn’t have the energy to stop it. “He was a year older than me, maybe. We were the only white-looking kids in that part of the neighborhood—my dad’s Venezuelan or Puerto Rican or whatever—all my mom ever told me was that he was a South American exchange student, you know that—but I _look_ white, and I looked white then, so we hung out a lot. He was kind of an asshole, but we were kids. Y’know? And—and he was the good kind of asshole. He’d dump mud in my hair one minute and lay a bully out for me the next. My mom let him have free rein of our house. He came in and out a lot, never had to knock.”

She can’t speak for a minute. Matt hesitates, and then tugs off his gloves, setting his fingertips to her kneecap, almost too light to feel. It doesn’t help. Darcy squeezes her eyes shut.

“His dad worked nights, slept during the day.  His mom was gone, I don’t know if she died or—or she left, or whatever. It was just Eli and his dad. I came in one day looking for Eli, I don’t remember why. I know—the first thing that I noticed was the smear on the linoleum. As thick as paint, almost. I—I didn’t know what it was. I touched it, smelled it. Eli had nosebleeds sometimes. I thought that’s what it was.”

She thinks Matt’s hands might be shaking.

“I must have heard something, because—because I went to look in the living room. The TV was on, really loud. It’s why they didn’t notice me. I—I looked around the corner, and I could see the—I could see the belt. I remember that the buckle was silver, or sterling, or something. There was blood on it. Eli had a towel in his mouth so he couldn’t scream.”

“Darcy.”

“I ran away,” says Darcy. Her eyes burn. “I—I didn’t know what to do. I remember—every time I saw Eli after that I’d see bruises on his arms, and legs, and I’d never _noticed_ them before. I started watching for when he’d flinch, when things hurt him. When he couldn’t sit down right, when his back hurt, when sometimes I could—I could see the scars through the back of his t-shirts. Where he’d bitten his lip to stop screaming. I think—I think his dad hit him harder if he screamed.”

Matt clenches his hands so tight that she can see his arms shaking with the tension of it. 

“Jesus Christ.” She grabs the used Q-tips, dumps them in the trash. “I never told anyone, Matt. My mom was a drunk, couldn’t keep a job down half the time, the rest of the time she was—she was usually too depressed to get out of bed. I didn’t trust any of my teachers. Nobody else in the neighborhood cared. And—and it was the sort of place where the police were more dangerous than the druggies, I couldn’t go to them. I should’ve told _someone_ , but I didn’t know who to tell, and I didn’t say anything. Eli—I don’t know if Eli saw me or not, that night, but he never said anything.”

“Darcy,” he says again, but she shakes her head.

“Let me finish. If I don’t—if I don’t finish, you won’t understand.”

He shuts his mouth.

“Eli died,” she says. Her voice is so small that nobody should ever have heard it. Still, she can see Matt shifting around in his chair. “A few months later. His dad beat him up so badly that—that his neck snapped. They found the body a few weeks after, in a garbage bag under the docks. They—” Her breathing catches. “The—the cops said it was because he tried to mess with the local gangs, that one of the ‘bangers did it. His dad—his dad went on the fucking _news_ , asking for his baby boy back. When Eli was _missing, presumed deceased_.” She crooks her fingers into air quotes. “The—the body was really decomposed when they found it, almost—almost liquid, the reports said. Lots of broken bones for a kid, the ME thought, but—low class neighborhood, full of gang activity, scrappy kid, what would you think?” Her throat starts to sting. “We lived on that street for three more years. The dad changed jobs. Started working days. I used to—” she swallows. “He used to get home around the same time as me. I’d see him drive by every day. And—and every time I saw him, I’d imagine how I’d kill him.”

Matt goes absolutely still.

“I thought about burning his house down,” Darcy says. Her tongue feels swollen, ungainly. “I thought about cutting his brake-lines, so he’d drive right into traffic. I thought about beating him with a baseball bat. I thought about sneaking into his house, poisoning him. I thought about stealing a gun, or buying one from one of the ‘bangers. I thought about cutting his throat while he slept. I thought about shoving him in the way of an oncoming car.” She worries at the hem of her sleeve. “I nearly did it, a few times. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen, once, and hid it in my jacket. I stood at his back door for nearly an hour, at midnight, staring at it. But—but it was locked, when I tried it.”

She can remember the chill of the doorknob, cheap metal leaving a clinging bloody scent on her palm. She’d shaken the door twice, and then fled when she’d seen the light go on in the master bedroom. She’d felt about ready to burst out of her skin, like something was burning inside her, another Darcy, like a fiery chrysalis. She squeezes her knees tighter together.

“We moved when I was fourteen,” she says. “I never—I never told anyone about it. Until now.”

Matt closes his eyes. Darcy’s shaking, her cheeks damp. She swipes at her face with the back of her hand.

“That is the _only reason_ ,” she tells him in a hiss, “that I’m not telling you to get out. Because I _get it_ , okay? I _get—_ I get wanting your friends to not know a part of you that—that makes you hate yourself, or makes you scared of yourself, or whatever the fuck your powers are to you. I get that. And that is the _only_ reason why I am not asking you to get the _fuck_ out of my life, right now, for lying to me for _seven years._ So you’d better fucking appreciate it, Murdock.”

There’s drops of something clinging to Matt’s eyelashes. She’s not sure if it’s sweat or tears. He nods once, and takes a deep breath. “Okay.”

Darcy leans back, and makes herself look at him. “I am _really_ fucking angry at you,” she says.

“I know.”

“And the worst part is I can’t even be all-the-way angry at you, because I’m even angrier with myself.” She lifts her fingers to the bruise on his cheek. “Because someone else I care about was being beaten into the ground every night, and I didn’t see it.”

She pulls back before he can do something like lean into her hand. She can’t deal with it right now. Darcy chokes down a sob, and then says, “So yeah. I’m very, very angry. And I don’t know when I’m not going to be. So there’s that.”

“I know,” he says again. He lifts a hand to his sternum. “I can hear it.”

She can’t help it. “What?”

“You blink a lot when you’re mad.” He takes a shallow breath. “I can hear you clench your fists, your teeth. Your heart rate picks up, not as much as it does when you’re scared, but enough. It’s—it’s pretty distinct.”

“My anger is distinct.” She gets to her feet. “Okay. I’m officially overloading. You, stay here. Sleep, or leave, or do whatever. I’m—I’m gonna go share with Karen.”

“Darcy—”

“Matt, seriously? Don’t. Just don’t, right now. Okay?” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “If—if you’re still gonna be here in the morning, then I have some of your clothes in—in one of my drawers. I’m sure you can smell which one.”

It’s bitchy and it’s mean, but she shuts the door before he can say whatever she can see in his face. It looks like _I’m sorry,_ or _please forgive me,_ or _I didn’t mean to hurt you_ , or _I understand_ , because if there’s anyone who can understand the way the knife felt in her hand that night, like an extension of her soul, it would be the devil _._ It might be something even more dangerous than that. She doesn’t want to hear it. Darcy pads into the living room, where Karen is curled into a ball on one side of the fold-out couch. The light from the TV is turning her skin grey. Darcy hits the off button on the remote, and then sets her hand to Karen’s bare shoulder, shaking twice. “Karen.”

“Mmm?” She rolls over, blinking slowly. “Whazzit.”

“My roof is leaking.” It’s as good an excuse as any. “Can I share with you?”

“Mmm.”

Karen smells like vanilla shampoo and lotion and the slightest hint of toothpaste. When she realizes Darcy’s shaking, she hooks an arm around her waist, and sighs. “Darcy?”

Darcy shakes her head. “Nothing. Nightmares.”

“C’mere,” says Karen, and Darcy lets Karen draw her into a hug. She strokes Darcy’s hair, mumbling things under her breath in a way that makes Darcy think of soothing a helpless child. Darcy doesn’t protest, squeezing her eyes shut and failing miserably at keeping back the tears.

She’s not sure if knowing that Matt can hear her makes it better, or worse.

.

.

.

Of course she dreams of Eli. She barely dozes for an hour before she’s seeing him coming out of the dark, the flesh melting from his bones, the belt with the sterling-silver buckle dragging in one spattering hand. He might be trying to say her name, but his tongue falls out before he can manage it. She shoots away from Karen, digging her nails into the pillow and covering her face to keep herself from screaming. Karen jolts awake, making blind shushing noises, reaching out with both hands to try and touch her. “Darcy, Darcy, it’s okay, you’re okay—”

She takes a huge gulp of air. Then another. Nausea curls in her throat. _Gun_ , she thinks. She left the gun in the bathroom. _Sloppy, sloppy._ “Sorry,” she says. “Go—go back to sleep, Karen. I’ll be okay. I’m sorry.” She can see blood under her fingernails. Darcy rubs her arms. “Go back to sleep.”

Karen reaches out for her again, and then stops. “Yeah,” she says, slowly. “You sure?”

“I didn’t mean to wake you.” Darcy makes herself smile. “Go back to sleep, okay? It’s just a nightmare.”

Karen doesn’t believe her—her eyes are too shadowed, her mouth too thin—but she nods, and sinks back into her pillows. Darcy slips off the fold-out couch, and grabs her gun and her Columbia hoodie from off the hook near the front door. Then she filches her last pack of cigarettes out from behind the coat rack before slipping out the tiny balcony door in the kitchen.

The smoke dries out her throat and turns her eyes to sand, so there, at least, it helps. She takes a deep breath of it, and then blows out a smoke ring, leaning her elbows against the railing. She hasn’t smoked in six months, maybe a little more—she’s gifted with one of those metabolisms that doesn’t addict easily—but it feels familiar, still. Like coming home. Darcy flicks her lighter once, twice, three times, staring at the flame, and then drops it over the edge of the balcony like the Bailey’s bottle. It’s her last cigarette, she thinks. She won’t need it again, not after this.

It’s the rosy edge of dawn, now. She can just barely see the first fingers of sunlight arcing over the end of their alleyway. Her toes are already cold. She’d been stupid to think that she’d be able to sleep, after talking about Eli. After learning about Matt, and Mike, and Mike and Matt. She should have just made coffee and toughed it out; the hour will just make her feel worse.

Darcy takes another breath of smoke, and closes her mouth, trapping it in her throat. Maybe if she holds it long enough, it’ll burn. The gun hangs heavy in the pocket of her hoodie, like a parasite. Or a tumor, she thinks, looking down at it. Deadly the way cancer or an infant can be deadly, just through existing, unintentionally and without remorse. 

“So you’re the one.”

There’s a man standing just below her mini-balcony, his head cocked to one side as if he’s listening. It’s just light enough, in the dawn, for her to see the sunglasses, the guiding cane with a strange spatter pattern. Then he leans his head back, and she realizes that the dark smears against his nose and mouth aren’t dirt or bruises, but blood. Her stomach winds itself into knots. “Hey,” she says, slowly. “You okay there, dude? What happened to your face?”

The old man scoffs, dabbing at the blood on his lips. “Little shit. Still needs a good kick in the ass, if you ask me.”

Darcy stubs her cigarette out on the metal railing, and leans to the side so she can drop it into the dumpster. “Uh. Sorry. Do you need me to call someone for you?”

“ _Do you need to call someone for me_.” The old man’s mouth twists. “Stupid-ass damn thing to say. Lots of things I need. Coffee that isn’t five bucks a pop. A subway system that actually works. Eminem to stop making music. But mostly what I need is for you to butt your ass out of his life.”

Darcy blinks. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t play coy, it’s not cute,” says the old man. She’s starting to wonder if he’s actually high on crack or something, because he’s definitely making no sense whatsoever. “His whole place stinks of you. Another woman, too, but you’re all over everything. You think I don’t know where he ran to after what happened tonight? He’s in there right now, isn’t he?”

Darcy clenches both fists tight. Of course. Of _course_ it’s about Mike. Or Matt. Or Mike and Matt. “This is really not the time, dude. I’m not having a very good night.”

“Bully for you, neither am I.” Crackhead dude isn’t being noisy, exactly, but he’s not being quiet, either. Oh, Jesus. If Matt wakes up, she’s going to fucking scream. “Worst thing about it is that I don’t even think you’ve slept with him. Still have him wrapped around your pinky like a goddamn toy.”

“Wow, okay.” She sets a hand to her semiautomatic, and then makes herself peel away, forces herself away from it. “Did someone piss in your eye or are you just naturally this sulfuric?”

“Girly-girl, you haven’t even seen me mad yet.”

“Good, because you haven’t seen _me_ mad, either, and I guarantee you I’ll win.” She swipes her hair out of her eyes, hating the cut of it, the way it scrapes at her cheeks like bugs. “Whatever you want, I’m a) way too fucking tired and b) too done with misogynistic old men to even pretend that I care. Hope you trip on a curb and break your nose on your way to the highway, asshole.”

“You think you matter?” He scoffs. “I’ve known that boy since he was ten years old. He knows better than to care about floozies.”

It feels like someone’s just taken a baseball bat to her back. All the air goes out of her lungs. Darcy takes a breath, and says, “Okay. We’re done. You need to go.”

“So scary. You gonna use your popgun on me?” His lip curls. “Kitten, don’t fool yourself. You don’t have the balls.”

“Okay, first of all, if you ever call me kitten again, I will fucking destroy you.” He scoffs again. Darcy ignores him. “Secondly, have you ever actually touched your balls? Take a page out of Betty White’s book on that one. Also, there’s a difference between me shooting _you_ , and shooting _at_ you. I’m more than willing to shoot _at_ you. If you’re the sort of person I think you are, the chances of me hitting you are basically zero anyway. And, y’know, gunshots draw attention, which I have a feeling you really don’t want.” She considers. “I could just shoot straight up in the air. That’d work, too.”

“You’re not even—”

Lorna’s boyfriend before Lou had taught her how to shoot squirrels with a Beretta. Not the safest choice, or the smartest, but Isaiah had been a bit of an idiot, and more than a little drunk most of the time anyway. Still, it’s left her with decent aim and a knowledge of handguns that’s a little more than basic. Darcy draws the gun, flicks the safety off, and fires into the dumpster before she even realizes she’s made the decision. The concussive _bang_ of the shot makes her arm hurt, sets her teeth on edge. The blind guy, though—he stands stock still, lips parted as if she’s surprised him. Darcy blows air out of her nose, and lowers her arm until the gun lies hot against her thigh.

“Yeah,” she says. “That’ll do.”

She hears the window to her room open. Matt sticks his head out, and he’s in one of his old shirts that she stole from him years ago, her largest pair of sweatpants riding low on his hips. His eyes narrow, and he heaves himself out onto the grating. His hands are clenched. “What are you still doing here, Stick?” Matt’s voice is Mike’s, almost, and she thinks it should frighten her. It doesn’t. “Thought I told you to leave.”

“Hey, keep your pants on, Matty. I’m on my way out.” Stick— _seriously? His name is Stick?_ —cocks his head, and Darcy wonders all of a sudden how these two know each other, because it looks exactlylike when Matt does it. Then she sees the bruises again, and she _knows._ “I just wanted to get a look for myself at what’s keeping you from manning up and doing your goddamn job.”

“We’re not having this conversation again. Get out or I’ll kill you this time, I swear to god.”

“Interrupting Darcy says wow,” says Darcy, and they both turn their faces towards her, Stick scowling, Matt with that _seriously pissed off and I don’t care who knows it_ clench to his jaw. “Okay, first of all, toxic masculinity is choking me. Seriously, I think the sudden flood of misplaced testosterone that just swept through here is gonna, like, drown us all.” It might be her imagination, but she’s fairly certain she just saw Matt’s lips twitch. Darcy shoves the gun back into her hoodie pocket, because she’s pretty sure she can hear Karen in the kitchen, and that is not going to help anything. “Secondarily, Twig, or whatever your name is: thanks, y’know, for coming through and trying to act like you have any control of the situation whatsoever, but kindly fuck yourself on a rusty spike, and then read some Simone du Beauvoir, because I’m not gonna hang around waiting for you to stop being a patriarchal tight-ass fuckwad asshole-face. You have no right to tell me who I am or what I can do, no matter who you might have been to Matt, once upon a time, and guess what? Whoever that might have been, you’re not that now, because I’ve never even heard your goddamn name.” She tugs her hood up over her head, and points at the front to the alley. “You’re dismissed. Get the fuck out of my city, or next time I’ll shoot you in the dick.”

She heads back inside before she can hear whatever Stick has to say in reply, slamming and locking the balcony door behind her. In the kitchen, Karen’s standing with her hands clasped tight together, fretting with her rings. Her toenails, Darcy realizes, are painted Aqua Lily.

“Darcy?” She goes on tiptoe to peer over Darcy’s shoulder, but there’s no way she can see Matt from this angle. Or Stick, for that matter, but Darcy doesn’t care about Karen catching sight of Stick. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“Some drunk asshole took a potshot at the dumpster,” she lies, and hates herself. The gun feels like sin pressed against her stomach. “I called the cops already, don’t worry about it.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

She’s pretty sure Karen knows she’s not telling the truth. Still, there’s something closer to understanding than pity in how Karen reaches out, and slips her arm through Darcy’s. She wrinkles her nose. “Ugh, you smell like an old ashtray.”

“Helps me de-stress,” says Darcy. “It’s dawn. Wanna make waffles with me? I think we have an old iron somewhere that we could drag out. I’m sick of frozen waffles anyway.”

Karen yawns, and knuckles her eyes. “Yeah. Sounds good.”

She tucks her gun into her purse when Karen’s not looking, and zips the bag closed. Until she knows exactly what merry hell the Dread Pirate Wesley is going to rain down on her head, she’s not letting the damn thing out of her sight.

.

.

.

It is his personal belief that both Nobu and Madame Gao prefer to play up the perspective that many of their former associates have of them, that of the shadowy Oriental, knives in the dark and poison laced in jasmine tea. Wesley knows for a fact that Madame Gao has a whole wardrobe full of Western clothes, which is all she wears when she does not have to be seen by Russians, Mr. Fisk, or any of their respective underlings. Nobu plays racquetball at the YMCA closest to his high-rise apartment, and focused on Portuguese at a linguistics college in Tokyo before taking his place as _shateigashira_.

In a way, he admires them both for their duplicity. It makes them seem like stereotypes, like the typical quiet Chinese grandmother and the typical deadly Japanese assassin. It hides their true intentions while highlighting their dangers, and in Madame Gao in particular the act is as fine a piece of art as a van Gogh or a Vermeer. Nobu is slightly rougher, but only because he hasn’t has had as many decades to perfect his image. It’s as if both of them has read Said’s _Orientalism_ , distilled its message into life, and slotted themselves into a role designed to confuse, entice, terrify, and unsettle in equal measure.

He’d be lying if he says he hasn’t adopted some of their techniques himself. Wesley very rarely lies.

The first thing one notices when one is shown into Hironobu Orihara’s penthouse is the mural painted on the wall. It’s graffiti art, or one should call it that, technically, but even though it’s done with spray paint instead of brushes it’s a masterpiece of modernity. There’s a small child with no face placed front and center, the haircut and the clothes making it androgynous rather than overtly masculine or feminine. Nestled in the white paint that shapes out the child’s sack-cloth shirt are the words _Don’t trust: Governments, judges, the television, and people over forty._ It’s in Portuguese, but Wesley studied three languages over the course of his post-secondary career. Portuguese was his pet project, his side-note, but he can still make out enough of it that the message makes his mouth quirk. The Japanese man beside the door notices the look on his face, but though he sniffs and rolls his shoulder threateningly, he doesn’t mention it. (Nobu doesn’t need bodyguards. The men are here more to keep an eye on him than anything else.)

There’s another message scrawled across the wall, in kanji slashed so violently with lime-green paint that Wesley can barely make it out.  角を矯めて牛を殺す. In English, it means _the remedy is worse than the disease._ Beneath the phrase is a bloody emoji, its tongue sticking out.

The door to the back room opens, and Nobu (dressed in sweats and a plain T-shirt, freshly colored tattoos lacing up and down his arms and across his shoulderblades) scowls at the sight of him. “What do you want?” he snaps, and Wesley blinks twice before his mouth quirks.

“Done with the linguistic disguise?”

“Your employer sees what he must,” says Nobu, and hits the brew button on his coffee machine. “I do not have the patience to continue the game today. What is it you want?”

Wesley rocks on the balls of his feet. At the door, Nobu’s supervisor makes another angry sound, and mutters under his breath in Korean. Wesley’s research has turned up little about Hironobu Orihara, or whatever his true name is, but he knows from the illicit DNA test he had run on the man (so simple to collect samples, what with the knives Nobu keeps on his person at all times) that Nobu is half-Japanese, half-Korean. He knows from eavesdropping and surveillance that the man can speak both languages fluently, along with Portuguese, some Mandarin, some Cantonese, and, for some obscure reason known only to Nobu himself, Xhosa. So much for the _Asian technowizard_ stereotype. “I wanted to give you a head’s up,” he says, after a moment. “As a matter of courtesy. My employer wishes to show that despite the incident last night, we are still in accord with your organization and its eventual goals, and we wish to assist however we can.”

Nobu angles a look at him, and then opens the fridge. “ _Ii na,_ ” he says. “Such a benevolent man, your _employer._ ” He spits the word. “Liar though he may be, but he does try to keep up the pretense of formality.”

“There is no better place for etiquette than in the mud,” Wesley replies. He flicks his fingernail against the top of his file, and then places it quite deliberately in the center of Nobu’s kitchen counter. Nobu, orange juice in one hand, shuts the refrigerator and opens the file with his free hand. The top page is a print-out of one of Lewis’s Facebook photos (her page may be set to private, but her profile images are not). Nobu’s eyebrows clench together.

“Who is this?” he asks, and at the door the Korean man mutters something else, as if he’s lecturing.

“I’m surprised your men haven’t noticed her sniffing around your trail, yet.” Wesley folds his hands behind his back. “She’s a lawyer, looking into Goodman’s…matter. In the process, she’s been uncovering evidence about your family and organization better left alone. I thought you would like to know.”

Nobu puts the orange juice down on the cutting board, and turns a page. Then he turns another, and reads through the summary of what Lewis has managed to ferret out into the light. “My men have told me of this woman,” he says. “I saw no point in worrying. She’s found little, has publicized less. She is of little concern.”

“She would be of little concern if she didn’t have her own private hotline to the devil of Hell’s Kitchen,” Wesley says, and flips to the back of the file. There in all its glory is one of the best surveillance shots they’d taken of Lewis and the masked asshole, before the vigilante had dangled their photographer over the edge of a roof and politely encouraged them to leave. The devil (he still wonders if the man called himself that, at the beginning; it seems like the sort of self-aggrandizing bullshit that hoods or vigilantes or superheroes or whatever these idiots call themselves seem most vulnerable to) has his hand resting lightly on Lewis’s shoulder, and her face is turned towards him. Her body language is the sort of soft that comes from long acquaintance or foolish trust, and the devil is the same. It’s not what has interested him the most about Lewis, the past few days, but it’s fascinating in its own right. He knows it’s all Nobu will see.

Sure enough, Nobu looks up at Wesley, his mouth twisting. “What is it you want from me, Wesley?”

“Why would you think I want anything?”

Nobu snorts. “You always want something.”

“This is true.” Wesley clings to the moment for as long as he can, simply because it seems to irritate the mumbling guard by the door. “I want you to give me three men, a gun, and a quiet place for her to be dealt with.”

Nobu’s eyebrows snap together. “You could have done this on your own. Why come to me?”

“Yes, I could have. I was planning to, until last night.” Something dark flashes across Nobu’s face. Wesley raises his hands. “You’re right. I could have done this by myself, but courtesy demanded that I tell you the truth of the matter. I have. Anything this woman does, or has done, casts light on the organization when its place is in the shadows. As I recall, your men seem to operate best there.” He pauses. “It is, of course, up to you. But I would hope you regard it as a gift. A truce, of sorts. In the interest of better work relations.”

The offer sticks in his throat, but there it is. If Nobu and his men are a necessary evil, then he might as well aim them in a more conciliatory direction—or, at the very least, keep them from setting their sites on Wilson Fisk.

“I don’t want her dead,” Wesley says. “It’d be too obvious, and besides, she’s better off left living. At least, until her masked friend comes to call.”

Nobu stares at Wesley for a long time. Then he collects a thumbtack, the file, and a can of spray paint from under the kitchen sink, and pads to his work in progress. Wesley follows, careful to stay out of the line of fire—his suit is new, after all—and watches carefully as Nobu pins the image of Darcy Lewis over the empty face of the androgynous child. Then he tosses the file aside, and draws a line of red through the photograph.

“Dramatic,” says Wesley. “Still, it gets the point across.”

“You won’t need three men,” says Nobu. “One will be enough.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (*Reading Rainbow theme song*)
> 
> AND THAT'S WHY THEY CALL HER CLIFFHANGER.
> 
> (Those of you who gave me playlist covers, please let me know what sort of oneshots you want! Otherwise I will exercise writer privilege and write you things anyway because you're darlings.)
> 
> ALSO: THAT MOMENT WHEN IT DAWNS ON YOU THAT DARCY HAS BEEN BREAKING THE RACIAL BECHDEL TEST EVERY TIME SHE TALKS WITH KATE OR CLAIRE. 
> 
> OW OWWWWW. 
> 
> BITE ME, MCU. GIVE ME REPRESENTATION OR GIVE ME DEATH.
> 
> This is the photo on which I based part of Nobu's art. (You guys are super interested in that choice, haha. It will be elucidated urther at a later date.) I saw this in an alley in Shibuya while I was in Tokyo a few years ago. There was also a geisha woman with the same faceless aesthetic about twenty feet further down the wall, but I like the child better.
> 
>  


	10. Feathers of Lead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AKA, Attack of the Cliches. Or, the one where everyone makes dumb decisions and it's kind of awesome. 
> 
> Trigger warnings for: angst, discussion of healing cuts (Foggy's), discussion of past assault, discussion of possible assault, discussion of possible death, mentions of panic attacks, mentions of emergency first aid, murder, discussion of heights, and mentions of police brutality.
> 
> Chapter title from a line from _Romeo and Juliet_ as so:  
>  _Why then, o brawling love! O loving hate!_  
>  O anything, of nothing first create!  
> O heavy lightness, serious vanity,  
> Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,  
> Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,  
> Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!  
> This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
> 
> As of now with this fic I have received two marriage proposals, four mix covers, and so much love I'm dying. You guys are the best. 
> 
> Unbeta'ed, edited, possibly still has mistakes. But whatever.

Matt’s gone by the time they finish making breakfast, leaving her window closed and her bed basically untouched. The cotton balls and Q-tips are still in her garbage can, and his gloves are on her desk. She’s not sure if he left them behind on accident or as a message, but she pulls them on anyway. She has big hands for her height, and they almost fit; they’re supple in the fingers from use, stiff around the wrist from dried blood or sweat or whatever else. Darcy flexes her hands inside them, and then decides to wear them to work. If he _had_ meant them as a message, she might as well show she received it, and if it was an accident, well. Maybe she can freak him out a little.

It’s totally not petty revenge. Stop looking at her like that.

Karen doesn’t ask about last night at all, just tucks her arm around Darcy’s waist for a moment and squeezes. Jen doesn’t mention the red rims to her eyes, either, though she does cock her eyebrows at Karen when they both think Darcy isn’t looking. Darcy makes herself smile at them both, and play-fights with Darla over the maple syrup on her waffles. It fools Karen, she thinks, but not Jen. Jen’s known her for too long for shit like that to work, so she makes the executive decision to escape before Jen can pin her to the floor with her eyes. _Go wisely, not bravely, young Lewis._

It’s not the devil’s brutality that’s hurt her, Darcy realizes all of a sudden. She knows why Matt beats the shit out of people. She _knows_ it, because she’s thought about it, too. (Atheists and Catholics, on common ground at last.) It’s the fact that he thought he had to lie to her about it. It’s that he’s lied for so long— _so_ long, she’s not even sure that the gash the truth left behind can be healed. The cold rage she keeps quietly burning for Fisk, for Wesley, for the Goodmans and for Bletchley, that doesn’t compare to the flare of temper and the swamp of self-pity she’s found herself in when it comes to the situation with Matt. You can’t mesh ice and fire, but her brain and her guts seem to be trying. Her heart, though—she’s not sure what that’s doing at all.

 _I’ll tell you later,_ he’d said. _Don’t worry about it._

_You both mean a lot to me. You and Foggy. More than I can actually say. Just—promise me that you’ll remember that._

Her promise is carved into her skin, into her bones. She doesn’t know what to do.

They run into Foggy on the way into the office, and he sees it too, instantly, damn him for being so empathic. Fooling Foggy is a completely different ball game than fooling Jen or even fooling Karen, so she doesn’t really try. She says that she and Matt had a bad argument, something she doesn’t want to talk about, “so don’t you dare ask, Foggy-bear, I swear to god I will dye your hair pink in your sleep if you try.” Foggy just looks at her for a moment, in a way that is unsettlingly close to pitying, before slinging an arm around her shoulders and giving her an awkward squeeze. She goes up on tiptoe and kisses his cheek, her lipstick leaving a livid print against his skin. She feels like a bomb, a timer ticking against her skin. She’d spoken with Wesley at one-thirty yesterday afternoon. It’s nine am now. _Four hours, thirty minutes until—_ until who knows. Until nothing. Until the office blows up.

Maybe she could trick Foggy and Karen into working from home today.

“So,” Foggy says, slowly, dragging it out as long as possible. _Soooooooooo._ “Uh, how about them Dodgers, huh, Page?”

“She knows about Ben, Foggy,” says Karen shortly, and dumps her purse onto her desk. Foggy blinks, then blinks again. He groans.

“Seriously? Am I the last person to hear about anything ever?”

“No, because she didn’t tell me, I guessed,” Darcy says, and boosts herself up onto the edge of Karen’s desk. “I met with Ben a few days ago for Kate, remember? He went all twitchy when I said I heard about him from a mutual friend. Wasn’t too hard to put together after that.”

Foggy makes an unhappy noise, and gives Darcy a beady look. Darcy’s pretty sure that she’s the only one that Karen will let sit on Karen’s desk, mostly because Darcy is the only one who a) tries and b) can manage it without knocking Karen’s financial papers everywhere. Foggy is, of course, jealous, because Foggy is a failboat. She blows him a little kiss when Karen’s back is turned, and then adds, “When did Foggy knowing become a thing?”

“When Karen decided to go visit Mrs. Cardenas after dark yesterday and two guys tried to attack her, that’s when it became a thing.”

“No, when I decided to go and ask her about Tully _at sunset_ and _you_ followed me because you thought I was—” Karen crooks her finger into air quotes. “— _acting weird_.”

Apparently there’s more than one amateur stalker-in-the-making at Nelson, Murdock and Lewis. It takes a phenomenal amount of effort to keep herself from saying this aloud. “Wow. Creepy, Nelson.”

“She _was_ acting weird! I didn’t—” He stops. “There is literally nothing I can say that makes it sound better. I plead the fifth.”

“Better choice.” Darcy cuts her eyes to Karen, and then says, “In the interest of full exposure, I may have had a serious death threat yesterday. You know. In Mug Shots.”

Karen drops her coffee cup, and it shatters on the floor. Foggy laughs. Then he stops. “Wait, seriously?”

“No, Foggy, I’m making it up. _Yes,_ okay? The Confederated Global guy, Wesley, he, uh. He basically said if I don’t toe the line with the Goodman case he will do bad, nasty things to me in his basement starting in—” She shakes her sleeve back, and checks her watch as Karen ducks into the staff room, swearing under her breath and rattling through trying to find the paper towels. “Approximately four hours, twenty-two minutes. If he keeps to his own timeline, which he might not, just to make me shit my pants all the more.”

“Okay, have either of you mentioned any of this to Matt, because I think he’d probably be flipping so much more of a shit if he knew _you—_ ” he points at Karen, who is holding the paper towel roll like a saber “—are secretly meeting up with a reporter and _you—_ ” he points at Darcy “—are in the middle of a death—seriously, a death threat? Did you get it on tape?”

“No, Foggy, I wasn’t expecting a death threat, okay!” She should have thought of that, though. She needs to get a voice recorder app for her phone. “I talked to Matt last night. He knows.”

Foggy gets this knowing look on his face, like, _ah, that must be it_. She really hopes he doesn’t ask about the fight. He comes to stand next to Darcy, as if placing himself between her and the door is going to do anything when the SWAT team or whatever’s going to happen busts in and lights her ass up with grenades. “Jesus. Jesus, okay. So we have four hours to get you on a plane to Thailand.”

“I’m not going to Thailand,” says Darcy. “I’m working something out, okay?”

“But what—”

“Foggy, seriously, until it’s ready I’m not telling you, because I don’t want you—” She pinches her nose, takes a breath. “I want you to stay out of it so there’s as little chance of you getting hurt as possible, okay? Just—trust me. Please.”

“The last time—”

“Foggy.”

“But—”

“ _Foggy._ ”

“Seriously, you’re just going to—”

“ _Franklin Seamus Nelson._ ”

“Fine!” Foggy throws his hands in the air. “Fine, don’t tell me your anti-death plan! You two and your secrets, seriously, K, how long did you think you could keep—”

The door opens.

“—keeeeeeep the fact that you are a fabulous can-can dancer to yourself?” Darcy leans back, catches Karen’s eye, and mouths _K?_ Karen shakes her head, and dumps the shards of coffee mug in the garbage can. Matt slinks through the door, and shuts it carefully behind him. He’s moving like his ribs hurt. Darcy carefully keeps her eyes away. “Seriously, we should take you to burlesque clubs or something, I know this one place with free dance night, it’d be awesome, we’d make a mint—”

“What aren’t you telling me?” Matt says, in a deeply suspicious voice. Karen pokes her head up over the top of the desk, and goes grey.

“Jesus, Matt, what happened to you?”

“Bike messenger,” says Darcy, before Matt can say anything. “Knocked both of us down. I, with my cat-like ninja skills, was unhurt. Matt was less lucky.”

Karen gives Darcy a _gurl, I know dat’s bullshit_ look, but doesn’t say anything.

“Yeah,” says Matt, belatedly. “I’m okay, though. What aren’t you telling me?”

Darcy sighs. “Foggy, seriously, this is why we don’t tell you stuff, you can’t lie, like, at all.”

“Well, excuse me for being so virtuous that sins just show on my face. I can’t help being awesome.” Foggy shoves his hands into his pocket, not moving from his defensive position in front of Darcy. Has she mentioned how much she loves Foggy? Because she loves Foggy a lot. “So, what, we’re telling everyone our super-secret plans now?”

“Matt’s sneaky. I’m pretty sure he’d figure it out eventually even if you don’t tell him.”

“So you’re saying I wouldn’t have?”

She pats his elbow. “I think it’s best if I don’t answer that, Fog.”

Foggy makes a face. He still hooks an arm around her shoulders and hugs her, because he’s Foggy and he’s awesome. Darcy burrows into his side, and squeezes her eyes shut for a long moment before slipping off of Karen’s desk again. “You,” she says to Matt. “Sit, before you fall. I’m going to make coffee.”

“I can do it,” says Karen.

“In the interest of full disclosure,” says Foggy, “I’d—kind of prefer Darcy do it.”

“So you’re saying my coffee is terrible, now?”

“No, I’m saying it’s kind of always been terrible. Please don’t hurt me, oh, god, your eyes, they _burn—_ ”

They’re still bickering over it as Darcy ducks into the staffroom, and goes through the motions of getting coffee into the press, hitting the button on their electric kettle with hands that are most certainly not shaking, shut up, she’s fine. Matt looks worse in daylight. She’s really not sure what to think, right now. Should she talk to him like everything’s still normal, when there’s still a dragon clawing at her insides, snapping and snarling and spitting acid, burning her up from the inside out? Should she act like she doesn’t know? _Can_ she act like she doesn’t know? (God, if Wesley’s men are watching her right now, and they see Matt with bruises, oh, Jesus, it’s so obvious when you look at it from the right angle and she’s not going to be the one who outs him to Wilson Fisk, she’s not, she’s _not_ —) Can she be normal around him when she’s told him basically the worst thing about herself, the part that reminds her of a scorpion or a snake, curled under a rock, ready to kill?

She can’t, she decides. Matt knows about Eli, now, and she knows about the devil. There’s no changing that. And as furious as she is, she’s not sure if she’s angrier at Matt, or at herself. So she’s just going to fucking deal with it.

Darcy carries the press out into the main room again, leaving it on Karen’s desk while she collects the mugs from various and sundry hidey-holes they each have around the office. She gives Karen her _bite me, I’m a vampire_ mug to use, because Karen’s butchered hers ( _sorry, Kare_ ). Karen gives her half a smile, and hooks her pinky through Darcy’s for a moment before taking the peace offering. Foggy doesn’t notice. “Seriously, your rules are terrible. You make terrible rules. I’m vetoing your rules, and we’re going to be a democracy, because I thought that was the point in having us all be equal partners.”

Karen makes a face.

“You are also an equal partner,” says Foggy. “Being a secretary doesn’t make you any less of a partner. You control us all from the shadows, very enviable position.”

“Wow,” says Darcy, pressing his _Suck a dick, your honor_ mug into his hand. “For once you didn’t put your foot in your mouth.”

“I aim to please.”

“Fine, it’s a democracy,” Matt snaps. “Any proposal that puts you, Karen, or Darcy in danger is not earning a vote from me, sorry.”

“Same goes for you, dude.” Foggy sips at his coffee, and closes his eyes for a moment, as if he’s just entered some sort of alternate dimension of awesome. “Yes, coffee. But yeah. I’m not for putting any of us in danger, either, because I’ve already had my side stitched up once in my life. I’d rather not know what a shiv feels like. But we can’t exactly learn what we need by locking ourselves in a closet and pretending very hard that we’re telepathic. I learned the hard way at twelve that you can’t develop psychic powers like that. It was very traumatic.”

Darcy gives Matt coffee too. He hesitates before he takes it, as if he’s afraid she’s going to dump it in his lap. When his fingers brush against the gloves (she's dumb and hasn't taken them off yet), his eyebrows climb up into his hairline. Still, he doesn’t comment. Matt clears his throat. “That’s not what we’re doing. We’re keeping out of the line of fire until we know for certain that there’s not snipers waiting on rooftops waiting to take us out.”

“As someone who has had a sniper rifle aimed at them in the past twenty-four hours, I second this.” Darcy ignores the merry hell that the room descends into after that, and shouts to be heard over Foggy’s cursing. “Buddy system. No one goes anywhere alone. No one decides to be a hero and goes off without telling anyone. No one keeps big theories quiet. If there’s something that might be dangerous, then we all know about it. No exceptions,” she says, Not Looking at Matt. She’s Not Looking _very hard._ “Text, call, post it to Dropbox, whatever. Paper trails are just as important as anything else.”

“Seconded,” Karen says, before Matt or Foggy can intervene. “Ben said being stupid gets you killed. He’d know, he’s been doing this for years.”

Darcy Does Not Look at Matt again. Somehow this time is even harder than the last.

“So, preventing hypocrisy—” Foggy frowns at her over the rim of his mug. “What, exactly, is your anti-death plan? You know, in case it happens in the office. Or it goes wrong. Or, you know, _you need to say something about it._ ”

Darcy rolls that over in her mind for a moment. “Hypocrisy acknowledged.” She crosses her arms over her chest, tucking her gloved fingers into her armpits. Her hands feel cold. “I was going to leave a message for the devil.”

Karen makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, almost like a protest, but gentler. Foggy chokes on his sip of coffee, and nearly spills it on his tie. “Yeah,” he says. “Like a terrorist will care. How would you even get in contact with him? It’s not like you’re friends on Facebook.”

Matt, somehow, does not flinch at that. She thinks it takes a lot of effort, though.

“Real-talk, he’s not a terrorist.” She squeezes her ribs, and then winces when she pinches the cracked one. “And, uh. I kind of have his number, maybe. _No_ , you can’t know what it is.”

It’s a miracle they don’t have to pick more porcelain shards out of the floor, considering how fast Foggy drops his coffee.

It takes twenty minutes before she can calm Foggy down enough to get him to see sense, and another half an hour before they work out all their Cardinal Rules of Investigation. She’s pretty sure that Karen’s going to write them all down and post them inside drawers or something, so they can keep track of everything. She’s also fairly certain that all the computer work Karen sets herself up with is going to end up being a comp-sci whiz’s attempt at making their new cloud circle impenetrable by most major hacker tricks. (Seriously. Karen is amazing. She wishes they were paying her more.)  

Thankfully it only takes about ten minutes to bully both Karen _and_ Foggy into letting her go to her meeting with Brigid O’Reilly at ten-thirty. Well, she tells them it’s at ten-thirty, anyway. Slipping off alone is more difficult. “Buddy system,” Foggy says instantly, and starts gathering up his papers. “I’ll go with you.”

“Do you seriously think that they’d try something in broad daylight, three hours before the deadline? No, not their style. And you sit your ass back down, your ribs are still gaping open. It’s like some kind of fucked-up barbeque under your suit jacket. So, vetoed.”

Karen makes a face at her computer screen.

“Democracy.” Foggy shakes his head. “You don’t have sole power to veto.”

“Fine.” Her stomach hurts. “I’ll take Matt.”

“In what universe is that better? No offense, dude.”

“None taken.”

“I was going to drag Matt out later anyway. We have an errand.” Matt thankfully doesn’t contradict her on this, though he does tilt his head just enough that she can see the question on his lips. “And please, Matt has a stick. Think Teddy Roosevelt with hipster sunglasses.”

“Setting aside the fact that I may need to draw that eventually because that sounds like the most hilarious thing ever, I’m really not—”

“Foggy.” She hooks her arm around his waist, leans her head against his shoulder. “We’re okay. Don’t worry.”

Foggy gives Matt a long, considering look. For some reason, it feels like the pair of them are speaking without words, even if Matt can’t technically see Foggy’s signals, and Foggy’s not technically saying anything at all. Darcy wonders, for a moment, if Foggy’s going to make a threat. Then he closes his eyes, and blows air out through his nose. “You two have made me the Harry in a Ron-Hermione spat. It’s not appreciated. I don’t want to take sides.”

“You don’t have to.” She goes on tiptoe, and kisses his cheek again, so that he has lipstick on either side. He doesn’t seem to have noticed. “We’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”

“You say that like it’s possible,” Foggy says, but he kisses the top of her head anyway (a miracle; she can count the number of times he’s done that on two whole fingers) and glances back at Karen. Karen’s eyes look suspiciously shiny, but when she turns back to her computer, the expression vanishes into dust. “Come on, K. We have much research to be done and very little time to do it.”

“Call me K again, and I’ll switch out Darcy’s coffee for mine.”

Foggy casually scoops his mug off the end of Karen’s desk, and holds it as far out of her reach as he can manage. “You can try, Page.”

“You have something on your face,” says Karen sweetly, and flashes a smirk at Darcy as Foggy swipes lipstick away on his fingertips. Darcy forces a smile, and then turns to the door. Matt’s slipped out of his chair, and waiting by the knob, lines of tension etched around his mouth, cracks in a renaissance painting. She swallows hard, and hooks her purse back over her shoulder again.

“Lead on, Macduff,” she says.

“Didn’t Macduff die?” Matt replies, his eyebrows lifting, and she opens the door.

“I don’t actually remember. _Macbeth_ was like a decade ago.” Still, the thought turns her guts frosty. “Who doesn’t die in _Macbeth_?”

Matt doesn’t answer. She pretends he didn’t hear.

They don’t go to Mug Shots, not right away, anyway. Instead, they walk two blocks further, to an empty lot marked with an old Union Allied Construction sign that’s been spray-painted over with the bloody smiley face from _Watchmen_. Someone’s dragged a rickety old basketball hoop into the corner. Darcy sets her purse on top of a covered dumpster, and watches Matt out of the corner of her eye.

“Can you actually shoot hoops?” She’s half-joking. It’s the only thing she can think to say. Matt’s mouth twists a little, and he shakes his head.

“Not in public, I can’t.” He takes a breath. “There’s a ball hidden in that garbage can, though. If you want to.”

Sure enough, there’s a freshly-pumped basketball buried under an empty trash bag in the lone garbage can. It’s marked with the name _Anjelika_ in silver Sharpie. _Sorry, Anjelika._ Darcy bounces the ball twice, and then shoots. The ball bounces off the hoop and rolls to a stop against the chain link next to Matt.

“So you can see through metal now, too?” She waits until he knocks the ball back to her with one foot. “I thought you really were, y’know, blind.”

“I am.” Darcy collects the ball from the ground, and starts bouncing it again. It’s hard to make a jump-shot in three-inch boots. “My eyes, they—there was a chemical accident. They don’t work. I guess my other senses just kind of…fill in the blanks. But I don’t see, technically.” He considers. “I heard the air inside the basketball vibrating every time you took a step. Also, it smells like rubber.”

“Fine, show off, then.” Darcy looks at the ball in her hands, and then at Matt, before bouncing it at him, hard. Matt drops his guiding cane in his effort to catch the thing before it hits him in the stomach, and gives her a dirty look. Darcy shrugs. “Hey, I’m still mad, remember? Besides, even if you can’t play ball, catch is a thing.”

Matt huffs. Then he tucks the ball under one arm, and takes his glasses off, tucking them safely away in the inside pocket of his coat. Darcy bits her lip. The bruises look so much worse in the light of day. “So,” he says, and bounces the ball twice, one hand to the other, before passing it back to her. “Whatever questions you have, you can ask.”

“Wait, seriously?” She presses Anjelika’s ball to her stomach, just for a moment. “It’s that easy?”

“That easy,” says Matt, completely serious. “I told you I don’t like lying.”

“Yeah, you said.” She tosses the ball at him again. “Okay. Question one: did you ever sleep with any of my roommates during college?”

Matt nearly fumbles the catch. Somehow he manages to cling on with the very tips of his fingers. “Are you serious? That’s your first question.”

“You said _any_ question, dude. That’s my first question.”

He Kermit-laughs, and it makes everything hurt. “No, I never slept with any of your roommates. What about you, did you sleep with any of _my_ roommates?”

“I didn’t know this was Twenty Questions.” She wrinkles her nose. “And, um, no. You’ve only ever roomed with Foggy, and I love him, but he is my brother-from-another-mother and that would be very, very incestuous.”

Matt doesn’t answer. Still, there’s a tilt to his mouth that wasn’t there before. She’s not sure if it’s anger or something else entirely that makes her heart jump in her chest. Then she realizes he can hear it, and blushes red. _Shit, seriously? Jesus._ She’s not going to go down that road, thinking-wise. Her brain would break. “Gimme the ball, Murdock.”

Matt throws the ball back to her. “Is that your only question?”

“Hell no.” She frowns. “What about the masking tape? I can get you being able to feel vibrations in the air or whatever, but glass seems like a problem.”

“I didn’t feel it. I could smell the adhesive. From the tape.” He shrugs. “You usually keep your office supplies in your desk drawer, so if I could smell it more strongly, I knew you had some on the window. Or I could guess, and then check if I flicked the glass right.” He must catch the look on her face, somehow, because Matt shakes his head and says, “It’s simpler than it sounds.”

“I’ll take your word on that.” Darcy runs her thumb over Anjelika’s name. “But yeah. I want the full story, start to finish. I might not be able to smell a lie like you can, but I’ll be able to tell if you’re bullshitting me. I can always tell when you’re bullshitting me, I just never say anything.” She can’t help herself. “Pretty sure that’s my superpower.”

Matt smiles for the first time since—well, since everything. Then the rest of his brain catches up, and he looks pained, instead. “It’s not—no. It’s a difference in heartbeat, not a difference in scent.”

“So with Karen, you knew she was telling the truth because her—her heartbeat never changed?”

“Yeah. Not exactly admissible in court, but I haven’t been wrong yet.”

“Huh.” She drops the ball, and catches it again at the last moment. “So you’re a human polygraph on top of everything else. But yeah. That’s my second question. What happened? Start to finish.”

Matt makes a face. “It’ll take a while.”

“We have—” She throws the ball back to him, and then checks her watch. “An hour before I have to meet with Brigid, and…two and a half before Wesley comes for me, supposedly. So. Time.”

His mouth goes tight again. “He’s not going to come for you, Darcy.”

“Why do you think I’m out here with you?” She flicks her fingers. “Ball. We’re going to have to talk about that, later, but—one thing at a time, I guess.” The absolute last thing she wants is to be the person who outs Matt to Wesley, and, in turn, to Fisk. (Look at it in the right light, and it’s obvious enough to hurt, the bruises and the reflexes and the Catholic hypocrisy, seriously, only a Catholic could pull off being a lawyer and a vigilante at the same time, and oh, god, her brain hurts.) “But yeah. Spill. All of it, start to end. We have time.”

A strange expression flickers across Matt’s face. It’s almost hopeful. Then it vanishes again. She’s not sure if she even saw it in the first place. “Sure,” he says, after a moment. “Seems like we do.”

There’s a whole bunch of meaning in that sentence that she isn’t going to even try to parse out. Damn him for having Deep Thoughts. Darcy flicks her fingers again, and opens her mouth to say, “I’m flicking my fingers, Matt,” but he’s already tossing the ball at her. She barely snags it out of the air before it hits her in the face.

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” She raises her eyebrows. “I was promised a story.”

And damn, but she gets a story.

.

.

.

9:09 AM  
_That house still up for grabs?_

9:09 AM  
_Closer to immediately than not? I kind of had a panic attack in a drug store and I think going somewhere new will help._

11:42 AM  
Yeah, totally. I’ll let Oppie know.

11:44 AM  
You okay?

11:46 AM  
_Just embarrassed._

12:15 PM  
She said yes, and you can go as soon as you want. I’ll stop by and grab the keys for you when I get off work.

12:16 PM  
_Oh my god, I owe you._

12:45 PM  
Actually, can I ask you a favor?

12:46 PM  
_Like I said. You found me a house. I think I owe you more than one favor._

12:50 PM  
Can you give me a crash course in first aid before you leave?

1:04 PM  
_I didn’t know if he’d actually tell you._

1:06 PM  
You knew?

1:08 PM  
_I guessed they were the same, more than anything. Are you angry with me?_

1:16 PM  
No. It was his secret to tell. You were right to keep it quiet.

1:18 PM  
So, uh, stitches? And stuff?

1:23 PM  
_I can’t teach you much. Come over tonight. I’ll send you the address. There’s only so many bits of information I can cram into your head before your brain starts leaking out your ears._

1:25 PM  
Please. I took the bar exam. All of your mnemonic devices are belong to me.

1:29 PM  
You’re the best, Claire.

1:32 PM  
_Don’t thank me yet, Lewis. You haven’t had to deal with my teaching style._

1:34 PM  
Aw, Temple. You worried about me?

1:37 PM  
_I feel like you should be more worried about yourself at the moment._

.

.

.

3:04 PM  
Kate: what was your plan for the TMZ interview on Saturday? It’s more your arena than mine, so I’d rather follow your lead.

3:17 PM  
**Are you asking what my plan for the interview is, or what my plan for keeping the sharks off our back is? Because for the second part I was going to bring my bow and arrows. Finally hacked into my dad’s safe room. He uses the same password for fucking everything and then gets pissy when I liberate my possessions from his autocratic grasp.**

3:19 PM  
Taking political science this semester, are we?

3:22 PM  
**You knew that.**

3:24 PM  
No, I did. I majored in poli-sci and crim-just so the fact that someone else is voluntarily taking political science makes me stupidly happy.

3:25 PM  
But yeah, TMZ. Plan?

3:27 PM  
**Doesn’t matter which reporter they send. Just dress vampy but classy, name-drop Columbia once, and tell the truth I guess.**

3:31 PM  
**And if they ask what name you’re wearing just ignore it because I already have an answer for that.**

3:34 PM  
I mean, I was just going to go with _Darcy’s Closet_ , but what were you going to say?

3:36 PM  
**‘Not the fucking point.’**

3:38 PM  
I feel like this is crossing some sort of client-lawyer barrier, but you’re actually the best.

3:39 PM  
**I know. Aren’t you lucky?**

3:41 PM  
Don’t you push it.

.

.

.

The meeting with Brigid O’Reilly takes less than half an hour, thank god. She’s not certain she would have been able to pretend to be focused for any longer than it was, because her head is fucking reeling. They return to the office in silence with peace offerings for Foggy and Karen, special coffees and a box of cinnamon buns. Darcy really shouldn’t be buying any of it, considering her money issues at the moment, but fuck it, she might be dead in an hour, whatever floats her boat. (She does not voice this to Matt, who is getting suspiciously twitchier the closer it gets to Wesley’s twenty-four hour deadline. Still, she feels like the principle is the same.)

Lynch and Jenson land today. She glances at Matt out of the corner of her eye, and wonders.

They’re only back at the office for an hour, maybe more (she’s sure to shut all the blinds, just in case another sniper shows their face) when the time limit passes, and the air changes. It’s like it’s scraping over her skin, the knowledge that she’s basically flipped a gigantic finger to Wesley and his goddamn boss. These are the people who tried to kill Karen, she thinks, as she sorts through her papers and pins things to her whiteboard and listens to theories and bad jokes and swearwords. These are the people who have been bullying Elena, funding the Goodmans, beating up Claire, and her, and Matt. These are the people who blew up Hell’s Kitchen.

She’s never thought she could hate someone more than she hated Eli Bletchley’s father. The way her hands keep dropping to the gun in her purse tells the lie.

In a way, the news about Blake waking up is a godsend. It’s something to direct her energy towards, some point of focus that she can use to pretend she’s not going slowly insane. Watching Matt twitch waiting for a chance to sneak away is a game in and of itself, one she doesn’t enjoy in the slightest.

(“I did everything the system says you’re supposed to do,” Matt had said, “and they still let that little girl down. I’ve never slept better than after I broke her father.” She thinks of the way he’d not even stirred when she’d slipped out of the bed, running her fingers one last time through his hair before standing under the showerhead, scrubbing her skin, her hair, trying to get the smell of Matthew Murdock off. Had she been in love with him then? She’s not certain. She doesn’t think so, but somehow she’s stumbled straight into it. Having him lie to her shouldn’t hurt so much, otherwise.)

Twenty minutes before nine, she collects her things, tells them she’s going to stay at a friend’s house for the night, and that they’re not allowed to look for her. Foggy says her rules are even worse than Matt’s and threatens to call her at midnight to make sure this friend doesn’t put on a mask and go prancing around after midnight, which Darcy takes with aplomb. Karen wraps her in a hug that lasts long enough for Darcy to feel the way she’s trembling, and forces her to swear to be careful.

“You’re the ones who have to watch your backs,” Darcy says. She doesn’t even have a joke about it. “If they can’t find me, they’ll go after you.”

“Mace,” says Foggy, pointing at Karen. Then he points at himself. “Badass. We’re good. Matt, you going too?”

“I left some of my stuff at home. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Walk her to her friend’s and make sure she _stays_ there, Matt,” says Foggy, in what’s supposed to be a whisper. Darcy can hear it anyway. “And call when you get home. Please.”

“Of course.”

“Be careful,” Karen says again, hugging Matt lightly, and then they leave, still silent, standing far enough away from each other that their hands don’t even brush. She’s never notice how close they walk together until she has to consciously hold herself away. Before she’d loop her arm through his and match their steps, be his guiding cane when he was tired of using it. Now she won’t let herself touch, and her muscles ache inside.

“You’re going to go after Blake,” she says, once they’ve turned the corner at the end of the block. “Aren’t you?”

“Fisk likes to work in the dark,” says Matt. “He doesn’t have a lot of time to get rid of Blake before he talks. The guy doesn’t strike me as someone who’ll keep his mouth shut after getting shot in the back.”

“Same as you that way, I guess. Working in the dark.”

Matt shrugs. “I don’t have time during the day. You know that.”

Darcy’s not entirely sure she agrees, considering how many times she’s spoken to “Mike” during the daylight hours, but she doesn’t mention that. She fidgets with her sweatshirt, tugging on a stray string from the hem. He sighs, and pushes his glasses up his nose.

“You want to say something.”

“Your super-senses tell you that?”

“How long have I known you by now?” Matt frowns at her. “I can tell when you want to say something, Darcy. Just tell me.”

“You’re not gonna like it.”

“I don’t like Karen and Foggy getting involved in this either, but it’s not something I can actually change.”

“This is a bit different than that, that’s all I’m saying.”

“ _Darcy_ ,” he says, and they could be at Columbia again. Matt had always been the one she’d had to convince to go along with her crazy shit. Foggy had been easy that way. “Come on.”

“I want to go with you,” she says, all in one breath. “When you go to talk to Blake.”

His mouth goes thin. “Absolutely not.”

“Hey, I know which hospital he’s in, I know what ward he’s in, and I bet you fifty bucks I could get Claire to sneak me in as a nurse. I don’t need you to get in there, Matt, and you know it. Just think about it, though—if I actually _do_ go with you, you can keep on keeping an eye on me. Don’t you even start,” she adds, when Matt’s lips tighten. “Like you weren’t going to be hanging all night anyway like some kind of weird, overly-aggressive bat. I’ve known you just as long as you’ve known me. You’re easy to read.”

“That’s not the first thing people say about me, believe it or not.”

“Yeah, well, they haven’t seen you drunk out of your skull at a burlesque club and getting hit on by a drag queen, so they don’t get a vote.” She flares her fingers at him. “Besides, I kind of need to go. I still have your gloves, and you can’t leave your prints anywhere.”

“I’d noticed,” Matt says, his voice odd. “I thought you’d burn them, or something.”

“Hey, my hands get cold.” It’s a shitty excuse and they both know it. Darcy looks down at her fingers, and then tugs at the edges of the gloves. “Do you want them back yet?”

“I have another pair.” He says it fast, as if he’s been waiting for her to ask about it. “You can keep them.”

Oh, Jesus. Is this a thing? She’s not sure if this is a thing. Darcy shoves her hands in her pockets, unsure what to do. She doesn’t _do_ this with people. She’s either friends with someone or she bangs them, she doesn’t like getting a bunch of messy feelings into it and not knowing what to do with them, because look at what happened with Eduardo. She’s _good_ at no feelings. Why did she have to go and get feelings?“But yeah. I’m coming with you.”

“His room is on the fifth floor and there’s no fire escape on that level.” Matt shakes his head. “It’s going to be a pain in the ass to get myself in there, I’m not taking you too.”

Her voice goes tight. “I can get in on my own power, Matthew.”

“Darcy—”

“Matt.” They stop on the street corner, staring at each other. Well, Darcy stares, anyway. He’s fidgeting. “I need to see this. I need to, okay? And—and no matter how angry I am, we both know that probably the safest place for me to be right now is with you. Do you see any other vigilantes with a vested interest in keeping me safe?”

Matt blinks twice. Then he makes a noise, deep in the back of his throat, like she’s snapped one of his ribs. “I could probably think of a few. If I took the time to do it.”

“I don’t think I know any other vigilantes.”

“If they met you, I’m sure they’d try.” She’s not sure what to say to that, so she just clears her throat and ducks her head. Darcy tucks her thumb into the back pocket of her pants, the fabric of the glove scraping against her knuckles.

“That’s nice of you, but, y’know. I’m not really all that special.” She blows her bangs up out of her face. “So. Do I sneak in by myself, or do I get backup?”

Matt rubs a thumb over his lower lip. Then he closes his eyes. “God forgive me for this.”

“I don’t know if it’s God’s forgiveness you should be looking for, Murdock, but this’ll go a hell of a way to earning some of mine.” She tucks her hair behind her ears. “Come on. I need to let Jen know I’ll be spending the night at Claire’s first.”

She grabs the blonde wig that she wore to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral, because it seems like a good idea. She has a chest binder from her days in the Columbia theatre department (she’d had to take art courses somewhere, and she’d been a part of the drag show, too) so she shoves that into a duffel bag along with a shirt, a pair of shitty pajama pants that she doesn’t care about, and clean underwear before heaving it all up over her shoulder. Matt and Jen are talking quietly by the door, and she can tell by the look on Jen’s face that Matt’s given at least a little of the game away. Jen doesn’t ask, though. She just wraps her arms tight around Darcy’s neck and holds on for a good minute, a strange hitching in her breathing. “You get rid of those bastards,” she says, “and you c-come right back here. Understand?”

“Yeah.” She pulls away, and kisses Jen’s cheek. “You be careful.”

Jen kisses the top of her head. Her eyes are hard, rather than wet. “I can take whatever they dish out, Darcy. Don’t worry about me.”

And for some reason, she doesn’t. She should, but she doesn’t. Darcy nods, and clings tight to Jen for three more heartbeats before slipping out the door of the apartment.

Heading back to Metro-General is like returning to a disaster zone. Her skin creeps, her stomach churns, and under her wig-cap and her rose-colored glasses (because that’s a thing, apparently) her muscles are twitching. The semiautomatic feels cool against the base of her spine, sapping the warmth away. She says goodbye to Matt near the door to the emergency room, and he slinks off to put on the rest of his uniform (it’s in his briefcase, apparently; she’s not going to think how he’s going to manage it). The scrubs she’d been granted during the night of the bombings are scratching her calves, and she’s pulled a wool cardigan on over a shirt of a similar color and shade. At first glance, nobody’s going to be able to tell that she’s not a nurse.

She filches a name tag from the receptionist’s desk when the woman’s not looking, and pins it to her cardigan. Blake is on the fifth floor, and it’s filled with police officers. Most of them she doesn’t recognize, but of course— _of course_ Brett’s right at the door, of _course_ it has to be Brett, why couldn’t it be one of the cops she doesn’t know, has never met? Of _course_ it’s Brett. She closes her eyes for a moment, grabbing a random clipboard off the counter. _Come on, Darcy. Acting._

“Excuse me.” She tugs on the sleeve of the nearest officer, a woman with her cap still on and a hole in the cartilage of her nose from an old piercing. Her nametag says _O’Hara._ “The guy by the door, is that Sergeant Mahoney?”

Her eyes dart from the top of Darcy’s head down to her tennis shoes. “You new?”

“No, I just—I’ve been off for the past couple days.” She touches her cheek. “I was in a car accident.”

“You and half the ward, it seems like. I was talking to another nurse, that Claire woman. You guys in the same car?”

“Yeah, we were visiting a friend.” Darcy smiles. “But yeah. There’s a guy at the front doors of the hospital asking for a Sergeant Mahoney. I said I’d pass on the message, so, y’know. Message passed. Kind of a sketchy guy to be honest. He was bothering some of the women down in the waiting room. Maybe you guys should check it out?”

“I’ll let him know.” O’Hara tips her hat. “Thanks for the head’s up, Lebowski.”

 _Lebowski?_ She waits until O’Hara turns her back, and then looks down at her name tag. Sure enough, it says _Cara Lebowski_ on it in enormous letters. _Great. I’m so not going to a bowling alley in this._

Brett doesn’t give her a second glance as he passes her, O’Hara and two other cops on his tail, heading for the elevator. She’s pretty sure it’s because she’s blonde. (Brett’s not a very big fan of blondes in general, which is, you know, all kinds of prejudiced and problematic, but she’s just counting her blessings right now.) Darcy grabs a clipboard off the counter of the empty nurse’s station, and then makes a show of checking her watch before striding right up to the replacement officer, a kid who looks just out of the academy. “Hi,” she says. “I was just gonna go and check on his readings, if that’s okay?”

“Anything in your pockets?” says the boy in a bored tone, and Darcy shakes her head.

“Nah, but you can check if you want, I don’t have anything else to do. After this I’m on break.”

“Lucky girl.” He gives her a top-to-toe look just like O’Hara did, but much more deliberately. _I will not punch an officer of the law in the nose._ “Careful. Masked man might be in there.”

 _I’m counting on it,_ she thinks. “Oh, stop.” She smacks a hand against his chest. “I’m cleared?”

“You’re cleared. Go on in, Nurse Lebowski,” says the kid, and she waits until the door is shut behind her before rolling her eyes. _May I never have to deal with the Cohn brothers again._

She blocks the door with a chair, and then takes off her cardigan. Detective Blake is lying unconscious in his bed, his head tipped ever so slightly to the side. The yellow light from the window casts strange dapples over his cheek where it mixes with the fluoro lighting from the hospital ceiling. Darcy prods at the door twice, as quietly as she can, and then heaves the window open. “Matt,” she says, leaning out. “ _Matt._ ”

“Don’t say my name,” says a voice from above her, and she bites her tongue to keep from screaming. Matt’s crouched on the fire escape outside the window one floor up, scowling a little.

“Fine, Mike. Get in here, I don’t know how long I have before the kid tries the door.”

It’s a truly remarkable (and gut-wrenching) feat of acrobatics and core strength that gets Matt into the hospital room, and it’s not something she ever, _ever_ wants to watch again. They’re on the _fifth fucking floor_ , and he just swings in like it’s no problem. Darcy lingers by the door as Matt tugs his spare glove off, setting his fingertips to the pulse in Blake’s throat (the beeping monitor doesn’t shift, in either tone or speed) and then tips his head as if he’s listening. “Bullet perforated his lung,” he says after a moment. “It’s healing, but slowly. He has a heart murmur and it’s not helping.”

“Can you wake him up?”

“Not without—”

Voices sound outside. Darcy heaves the chair away from the door as quickly as she can, and looks at Matt in a panic. “What do I—”

“Under the bed.”

She drops. The hospital hasn’t been dusting the way they should, and there’s a smear of something uncomfortable-looking on the underside of the mattress, but she’s hidden, and that’s all that matters. Her wig hair is getting in her mouth. She has no idea what Matt does, but when the door opens, there’s no scream of “vigilante!” so he must have done _something_ to hide himself. Whoever came in, they have very shiny shoes.

There’s a rustle of paper, of plastic, and—for some reason—the rich scent of marinara. It tickles at her nose. “I’m sorry,” someone says, and then a popping sound, as if something’s just punctured a tire.

She hears a single footstep before Matt’s boots come into view. There’s a scrabbling, an odd rasping choke, and then the body of Detective Hoffman is laid with great care on the floor. Darcy watches until she’s sure that Hoffman’s still breathing, and then clambers back out from beneath the bed. Matt and Blake are speaking in low voices. Blake is whispering, so soft that she can’t hear it, but Mike—Matt has his ear tipped towards Blake’s lips. The door rattles again, and again.

“Mike,” she says, and Matt nods. He gestures to her.

“Window, come on.”

“ _Are you crazy!_ ” She creeps over to the window. “I can’t make that jump!”

“You won’t have to.” And he slips out into the night air, vanishing up onto the fire escape. Darcy flexes her hands, wishing she’d kept the gloves on, and then clambers up onto the ledge, turning so her back is facing the world. She can see the door shaking.

“Darcy,” he says, and Matt lowers his hands to her. “Come on.”

She doesn’t look down. Darcy grabs his wrists, and pulls. The wind makes her scrubs flap against her legs as together, Darcy and Matt heave the rest of her up onto the fire escape. She hears the door to Blake’s hospital room splinter. As soon as she has her balance again, Matt lets her go.

“Here,” he says, and presses her back against the wall of the hospital. “Don’t move. Don’t breathe.”

She doesn’t breathe. Down below, one of the cops—she thinks it might be Brett—sticks his head out of Blake’s window, and looks down. He doesn’t look up. She’s very conscious of Matt’s arm bracing hers, the way his lips are pressed tight together, how he’s holding himself so absolutely still. He catches her wrist, and squeezes hard. Darcy closes her eyes, and forces herself not to choke. Her chest binder is pinching at her fractured rib, and it _hurts._ It feels like an eternity before Brett vanishes back into Blake’s room, and shuts the window behind him.

Matt lets out a breath, and releases her wrist. “Come on,” he says. “There’s a ladder on the other side of the hospital that lets out in an alley. They won’t look on that side. Not right away.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” says Darcy, and follows him up the fire escape.

The alley doesn’t really deserve the name, to be entirely honest. It’s more of a smoking nook between Metro-General and the CVS that she’s sure does a roaring business in nicotine of all sorts. The entrance is blocked by an old dumpster, one that stinks of cat urine and rotting meat. Darcy steps out of her scrubs and yanks on a pair of jeggings instead, fumbling with the buttons so she doesn’t have to think about how she’s half naked in an alleyway. Matt doesn’t move, standing with his hands at his sides and his head cocked. She flexes her fingers. They’re trembling. “So, how much will Fisk want to kill me now that I’ve witnessed a murder?”

Matt says nothing. His jaw clenches.

“Don’t you dare say I told you so,” she says, and wonders if she’s going to throw up. Is this what shock feels like? She wants to laugh a little. “At least this way if we try to link Fisk to Blake we have a witness and not just hearsay. Though, y’know, technically I only _heard_ the murder and didn’t _see_ it but I feel like the principle of the thing is the same.”

“Darcy.”

“I don’t know what Blake told you, though, so, y’know, that’s your gig—though I don’t think you can exactly go into court and say _yes I heard him out Fisk as the strong-bad nasty_ without them having arrest you and commit you for life, which I’m not really okay with even though I’m still kind of mad at you—”

“ _Darcy_.”

“—but this’d be your moment to get me to like you again, you could buy me coffee or something, I always forgive when coffee’s involved, but I don’t think that’d be a good idea right now because I’m kind of panicking and I don’t—I’d probably explode.” She smooths an invisible wrinkle out of her top. Her voice is shaking. “Matt. Is—Is that how it works? Is that how fast it is? People die that fast?”

Matt twitches. His hands lift, and then lower again. “Yeah,” he says. “Generally that’s how it works.”

She’s going to hyperventilate. Darcy closes her eyes and takes three deep breaths. _Not until you’re at Claire’s._ “We should probably move,” she says. “Before the police come this way.”

“Where are you going?”

“Where are _you_ going? What did Blake tell you?”

He shrugs. “Things we already knew. I’m tempted to take it to Ben. Karen’s right about one thing—publicity keeps you safe better than anything, and if the three of you are going to keep sticking your noses into Fisk’s business—”

“The _four of us_ ,” she corrects, sharply.

“Fine. Yes. Four. All four of us need insurance. Ben might be able to give us that.”

“In that case, I’m going to Claire’s. I’m pretty sure Wesley doesn’t know I know her, and if I put the wig back on, they won’t be able to track me so easy.” She taps her temple. “I grabbed my costume stuff for a reason, remember? Besides, you probably have intimidating devil-things to do, didn’t Lynch and Jenson come back tonight?”

He shakes his head. “They can wait another night. Do you even know how to get from here to Claire’s?”

“Do you?” She can’t help it. She snaps a little. “Sorry. Yeah, I know how to get there. She texted me directions. On the burner, before you freak out. I know they haven’t done anything with that yet, it’s not like they can hack texts.”

“That we know of.”

“Thanks for helping me sleep tonight.” She heaves her duffel bag over her shoulder. “I just—okay. I’m going to go.”

“No, wait.” He tips his head. “They’ve worked out you were a plant. They’re looking for you, too.”

“They’re looking for a blonde woman with no boobs and no glasses. I can fix that in a public restroom.”

“Not as fast as you need to.” Matt clenches his fists, and then turns. “Come on. We can get you into the dumpster, and then I can lead them away.”

“I’m _not hiding in a dumpster_.”

“And I’m not about to watch you _die._ ”Matt hisses. “Get in the dumpster!”

She can hear boots on concrete, now. Darcy clenches her hand tight around the strap of her duffel bag. Then she tears the wig off. Matt makes a small, panicked sound as she tosses both the bag and the wig to the pavement, out of sight of the main street. Her heart hurts, it’s beating so fast. She can’t think. Her brain’s skipping like a bad record. _What the hell—how do we—oh, god, no—Blake—Ben—Matt—Matt—no—_

There's a bud of an idea in the back of her head, and it's crazy and impossible and it's probably not going to work and it's _definitely_ going to make everything worse, but they don't have enough time for her to climb into a dumpster, and she's basically dead if the cops track them down, and _oh, god, I'm so going to regret this._ “Matt,” she says. “Kiss me.”

Matt whips his head around. She’s pretty sure that if she could see his eyes, they’d be falling out of his head right about now. “What?”

“The cops are coming, I’m not blonde, and you look like a vigilante. _Shut up and kiss me._ ”

He clenches his hands tight. “I don’t—uh.”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” says Darcy, and before she can talk herself out of it, she goes up on tiptoe and mashes her mouth against his. Their teeth crash together, because he’s surprised and she’s sloppy and she can hear the cops shouting in the next alley over, but it’s not the worst kiss she’s ever had. She hates it in principle, because it’s fake, because it’s a disguise, but she can’t say it’s the worst.

 _Sorry, Matt,_ she thinks. Darcy closes her eyes. Then she reaches up with both hands, and pushes his mask back, away from his face. It’d blow their cover, if he keeps the mask. _Sorry, me._

Matt still hasn’t managed to get with the program. He’s standing stiff as a railroad spike, his hands out from his sides as if he’s not quite sure what to do with them. She can hear the cops shouting, coming closer. Blindly, Darcy pushes him back, two steps, three, and then there’s a scuffing sound of human on brick. They’ve found the wall. “Darcy,” he says, but she’s already gone up on tiptoe; her mouth coasts over his cheek (stubble and soft skin) before she finds his lips again. Darcy bares her teeth and nips him, hard. _Come on, Matt._ He makes a shocked little noise that makes her think of a startled cat, and rests his hands light as moths against her waist. _Come on,_ she thinks. _Think it through, we’re running out of time_.

The cops are getting closer.

Then, all of a sudden, he comes to life under her hands. Matt dips his head and presses his mouth down into hers, carefully, as if he’s afraid he’s going to break something. Darcy makes an impatient noise— _sell it, Matt, come on_ —and digs her nails into the collar of his shirt. It breaks her a little bit when she feels the way his heart is pounding, drumming a tattoo against her palm. 

“Matt,” she says against his mouth, and it’s like she’s flipped a switch. His hands flex and clutch at her hips, and suddenly she’s much, much closer, one of his hands pressed flat against the back of her neck, and his lips are parting against her mouth. His tongue flicks past her teeth, and holy _shit_ , where the fuck does a blind guy learn to kiss the way that Matt Murdock is kissing her right now? Darcy tangles her fingers in his hair and ignores the splash of the flashlight against her eyes. His mouth tastes like coffee and bits of her stolen cinnamon bun, a hint of sugar still caught between them, and when he scrapes his teeth against her bottom lip Darcy actually whines. Matt makes a sound in the back of his throat, and threads his fingers into her hair, which is _totally not going on her list of kinks, now, shut up._

Through a faint haze, she hears the cops swear to themselves and run off. The cops, she decides, don’t matter anymore. She hurts, and she’s hurting because he lied, but she’d be lying herself if she said she’d never thought about something like this. Well, considering the vigilantism, not _exactly_ like this, but whatever. She’s pushed away the thought of doing this for years, every time he’s smiled, because for god’s sake, she’s always been a sucker for a pretty smile. But it’s so much more than that, now, and when Matt drops his hands to her hips again and lifts her up onto her tiptoes, just enough that she can fist her hands into his hair without having to reach, she weaves her arms around his neck and holds on. Her heart’s racing and her lungs are squeezing tight and there’s tears pricking at her eyes, but she kisses him anyway, because she loves him (and when did that happen? She’s not even sure) and Matt, for some reason, is kissing her back. _Count your blessings, Lewis._

Finally, Matt strokes his fingers up and over her cheekbones, leaning away just enough that she can still feel the touch of his breath against her lips. She _feels_ him swallow, more than hears it. Darcy doesn’t want to open her eyes. If she does, reality will return, and she quite likes the dream. She feels the lightest touch against her jaw, the smooth brush of a glove, and she blinks in spite of herself. Matt’s mouth is swollen, almost bee-stung, and before she realizes what she’s doing, she’s lifted her hand and set her index and middle fingers against his bottom lip.

“Um,” she says, because there’s not much else she can say. She wants to run. She should run. She can’t bring herself to move. “Hi.”

Matt tips his head, and his nose brushes ever so lightly against hers. It’s intimate in a way that she’s never really had before, not since Eduardo, and even then she’d never let him come quite so close. From here, she can only see bits and pieces of the bruises. Mostly it’s his eyelashes, the pores of his nose, the way his hair is tangling over his forehead where she’s mussed it. Then he smiles, and in spite of everything, it feels like sunlight pouring over her skin. She’s never seen _that_ smile before.

“Hi,” he says, his voice cracking as if he’s holding something else back, and suddenly it’s too much. Darcy pulls back, just slightly, and Matt lets her go, letting her slide through his fingers until she’s standing on her own ground, on her own two feet. She’s shaking.

“Um.” She swallows. “Um. Yeah. I have to—I have to go.”

She bolts before Matt can say a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off! Another mixlist is up. This one is more focused on Darecy than TPoW in general, so have fun. (http://8tracks.com/shuofthewind/apologize-for-the-collateral-damage)
> 
> Secondly, I am going to be REALLY FUCKING SHAMELESS and direct everyone's attention to this image because it's fucking gold.
> 
> Crazy_Moonfox: _What the hell were you even thinking, Matt? You'd drag the two guys up to Darcy and present them to her like a cat with a mouse? "So, I'm actually a vigilante, I brought you these, please forgive me"?_  
>  shuofthewind: _....I wish I could draw. Because I would so draw that image. Kitty!Matt, presenting Darcy with two rats (Lynch and Jenson), tail twitching, little thought bubble: Please love me._
> 
>  
> 
> _Oh god if anyone wants to draw that I would actually do a fic exchange for you because that is the cutest fucking image._
> 
>  
> 
> _I CAN GIVE YOU TATTOO REFERENCES FOR DARCY IF YOU NEED THEM._
> 
>  
> 
> HINT MADE.


	11. Devil's Advocate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING FOR: Discussion of alcoholism and neglect by a parent, discussion of first aid (stitching, the possibility of bleeding out), knives, discussion of murder, discussion of past assault, discussion of past rape, discussion of bullying from a parental figure, transphobia, trans-shaming, discussion of drugs, discussion of past murder, gun use, gunshot wounds, and Sexually Frustrated Angst. 
> 
> KATE'S BACK GUYS
> 
> I tried my goddamn best with the Spanish, and had it checked by a friend of mine, but if anything's wrong please let me know~! (Also if you want the word-for-word dialogue translation but I feel like most of it is fairly easily interpreted.) 
> 
> Mrs. Cardenas means a lot to me okay

Bless Claire. When Darcy shows up on her doorstep with her chest heaving, her eyes red, her hands shaking, and a big-ass duffel bag hanging over her shoulder, all she says is, “I have booze and bloody cow meat. Which do you want first?”

“Booze,” says Darcy, and drops her bag onto the tile in Claire’s entryway. There’s a pile of shoes beside the door, and she kicks her off. “Please, god, booze, because I just made out with someone I promised myself I never would.”

“Santino,” says Claire, and a teenage boy with a high ponytail and a thin, lovely face pokes his head out of what Darcy presumes is the kitchen, eyebrows raised. “ _La bolsa, por favor.”_

“ _Sí_ ,” says the boy named Santino. He stares at Darcy (she’d taken her contacts out with shaking hands in a subway bathroom, hooking the blonde wig back onto her hair) and then nods once, as if she’s been approved, before collecting her duffel bag, trotting off with it. Darcy opens her mouth, and closes it again.

“Brother?” She asks, once Santino’s out of sight. Claire shakes her head.

“Neighbor. He lives two floors up, but his mom’s away a lot, and when she’s not away she’s drunk, and when she’s not drunk she’s sleeping off being drunk. He’s been twitchy since the Russians, spends most of his time here. I think he likes to make sure that I’m safe, y’know?”

There’s a split second where Darcy swears she can see Lorna’s shadow on the wall. Then she sighs. “Poor kid. I’ve been there.”

Claire gives her a sharp look, but doesn’t comment. “Come on. Alcohol’s this way.”

She sets Darcy up with a tumbler of bourbon (not cheap, but not expensive, exactly the sort of stuff Darcy’s used to) and has her examining, sanitizing, and stitching up angry-looking cuts in fresh meat by the time Santino returns from parts unknown. He looks at the meat, and then at Darcy, before shrugging and settling on the couch, unpausing the _Call of Duty_ game up on the screen and replacing a pair of Turtle Beach headphones on his head. Claire doesn’t react. This seems to be typical.

“So,” she says, when Darcy’s finished the first set of cuts, and moved on to the second. (“No, don’t jab the needle in like that, you’ll puncture an artery and then your patient bleeds out. Not fucking okay.”) “You okay?”

Darcy laughs. “Uh, no. It’s—it’s been a night.”

Blake is dead. Her stomach clenches. She’d _heard_ him die. More than that, she’d heard him being murdered. The popping sound of a syringe being shoved into an IV drip. The strange gagging noises as the poison reached his heart. _Detective Blake is dead._ She doesn’t even know his first name. She pokes herself in the finger with her wickedly curved needle, and swears. “ _Fuck_.”

“Don’t do that while you’re stitching people. It’s a great way to get HIV.” Claire sips her bourbon. “Our mutual friend?”

“Our mutual friend.” She knots a stitch, ignoring the way her finger is throbbing. “And—and, uh. You heard about Blake?”

Claire’s eyes narrow. “The cop in the hospital?”

Santino’s headphones are on. He’s cursing to himself in a mix of Spanish and English, button-mashing and shouting insults at whoever’s on the other end of his internet connection. Darcy swallows hard. “Um, yeah. He’s—he’s kind of dead.”

Claire clenches her hand tight around her glass of booze, but doesn’t say anything. Darcy bites her tongue before she can babble. “I, uh. I kind of heard all of it. I was under the bed. And then, um, Mike busted me out. And then I kind of, um. Kissed him. In an alley.”

“You kissed him,” says Claire, in a very blank voice. “Because of panic?”

“Because the cops were after us and it was a cover or a ploy or whatever you call super-spy moves like that, and it worked. Which actually still kind of surprises me and says bad things about the NYPD.”

“Oh.”

“ _I kissed him,_ ” Darcy says again, and without warning drops her head onto the table top. She thinks she has beef blood on her forehead now. She doesn’t really care. “I told myself I wouldn’t and I _did._ I told myself that since _freshman fucking year._ ”

“Darcy.”

“I’m an idiot.” She knocks her head against the table again. “I’m an _idiot_. I’m _so mad at him_ , and I _kissed_ him, and then I had a panic attack in a public restroom because people want to kill me, and there’s someone taking pictures of my bedroom through the window, and I was hanging out of a fifth storey window, and they killed Blake _right over me_ , Claire, and I want to stab Wilson Fisk in the eyeball and then fling myself off of a skyscraper because _I said I wouldn’t and I did._ I’m _so angry right now._ ”

“Drink your bourbon and finish that cut,” Claire orders, and Darcy obeys. Claire has a very scary sergeant-major face. “You’re not going to be able to do much if he comes in with a gunshot wound, but you’ll be able to reseal a laceration, at least.”

Her stomach rolls. “Have bullets happened?”

“Not so far.” Claire waits until Darcy ties off her newest stitch job, and then tugs the meat around to study it with a critical eye. “They’re too far apart. Make them smaller.”

Darcy picks up a butcher knife and rams it down into another piece of beef. The _squish_ of blood and meat under the blade makes her guts clench.

“He told you yesterday,” Claire says, after a moment.

“Yeah.”

“And the next night you tag along after him on one of his hunts?”

“I made him take me.”

Claire lets out a low whistle. “You’re a better man than I, Gunga-Din.”

For some reason, Darcy swears she smells marinara. _I’m never having a meatball sub again._ “I don’t think it was a bad idea. But, y’know. Um. People are kind of dead. And they’re looking for a blonde nurse named Cara Lebowski, I stole her ID tag, oh, Jesus, Fisk might—”

“She’s out of town on vacation, they’ll leave her alone, don’t worry.” Still, Claire takes a big swig of bourbon before speaking again. “Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“ _Jesus._ ”

Darcy nods, and snaps the thread. Her hands are shaking.

“When did you last sleep?” Claire says, in a voice that is far too understanding. Darcy scoffs under her breath, and gets a fresh thread through the eye of the needle.

“I don’t know. Not last night. And, uh. I have nightmares.”

“Drink your bourbon,” Claire snaps. “Stitch for another hour. Then go to bed. You can share with me, I have a queen. Santino will lock up when he leaves.”

“I’m not stealing your bed—”

“You’re not _stealing_ the bed, you’re borrowing half of it, and you don’t have to worry because I’m about as far from a sleep cuddler as you can get.” Claire sighs. “Just...we’ll talk about it on the way to the station tomorrow. Or something, I don’t know. Just breathe. Okay?”

She’s not sure she can manage that. But she pretends.

If not for the fact that Claire’s a nurse and knows how bad combining alcohol with a sleeping pill would be, she’d suspect Claire drugged her, because when she wakes up, it’s eight o’clock, the sun is shining, she’s had no dreams, and there’s Claire Temple digging through her dresser, tossing the last few shirts she needs into an open suitcase on the other side of the bed. Darcy blinks, and then drags herself out from under the spare blanket, making a noise like a dying possum.

“Morning, Shrek,” says Claire, and drops a lacy bra into her suitcase. “You kick, did you know that?”

“Generally if I share a bed with someone they’re gone before I fall asleep. So. Uh. No. Never came up.” She watches as Claire sorts through a stack of romance novels on top of her dresser, picking two and leaving the rest behind. She feels kind of hollow inside, and when she catches sight of her reflection in the mirror over Claire’s dresser, she realizes that she looks hollow, too. “Jesus,” she says, and touches her cheek. “I forgot to take my make-up off. I’m a zombie.”

“The pillowcase will survive.” Claire drops to her knees, zipping her suitcase shut. “Y’know, Mike—Matt never really talked about anyone in his real life. Mostly if I saw him he needed stitching up, or—or I guess just someone to confide in, a little. I’m pretty sure that I was the only one who’d ever seen his face, so he felt—I don’t know. He felt safe.”

Darcy’s not sure she wants to hear this. She crosses her legs into the lotus position, and scrapes her knotty hair out of her eyes, wrapping it up with a tie. “That sounds like Matt.”

“When the Russians grabbed me, I hid in his apartment for a little while.” Claire looks at her suitcase, and then grabs a kerchief from the top of the dresser, and knots it on one of the handles. “He doesn’t really have any pictures—you know that, Jesus. But there’s one that I found, on the kitchen counter. College grad photo. You were in the middle. Who was the other guy?”

“Foggy.” Darcy swallows. “Um. He’s the Nelson in Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis.”

Claire makes a considering noise, and rolls the suitcase to the door. Then she turns her back on Darcy and strips her shirt off. Darcy turns to look out the window. “I asked why he had a picture, since, y’know, he can’t see it the way other people do. He said that it was a gift.”

Darcy had given it to him. She squeezes her nails tight into her ankles, and doesn’t say anything. Claire doesn’t notice. She pulls on a muscle tank, and tugs her hair out from underneath the collar. “He didn’t really say anything about it, but I could tell how much you guys mattered to him. So if you’re worried that you coming up with a distraction strategy will make him hate you, or something, you’re kind of off-base.”

“No, that’s not—that’s not it.” She scratches the heel of her foot, hard. “I guess…I dunno.”

Claire touches her ear cuffs, scrapes her hair into a new part (it looks like she had part of her head shaved at one point, which is awesome) and then drops onto the corner of her bed, braiding away the gorgeous. “You dunno?”

Darcy makes a face. “It’s weird, talking about this with you. Considering.”

Claire shrugs. “I’ve had weirder talks.”

“But—”She scrapes her fingernails over her skin again. “I mean, I know you guys had a thing. Like, a thingy-thing. And, like, yeah, down with women hating women over dumb men, but at the same time it’s just—”

“Awkward?”

Darcy laughs. “Yeah, that.”

“Well.” Claire finishes her braid, and ties it off. “Yeah, there might have been a thing, but it kind of died. Still kinda stings, but it’s probably better for me in the long run.” She blows out air. “What it comes down to is that I’m a nurse. I fix people. He breaks them. Matt’s a good man, but that split—I don’t know if it’s morals or character or methods or all of them at once—that split would have destroyed us eventually. So the way I see it, it’s averting a disaster before it starts.”

She’s not sure if she wants to snarl or cry. Maybe both at once. Darcy grabs a pillow, and wraps her arms tight around it, pressing it to her stomach. Her rib whines. “Huh.”

“If you’re not telling me because you don’t trust me, that’s one thing, but if you don’t want to talk about it because you’re afraid you’re going to hurt me or something, get your head out of your ass. I’m a big girl, Darcy. I can take a bit of discomfort.”

It strikes Darcy all of a sudden that Claire is a much better person than she is. She doesn’t feel inadequate, exactly, but more like: _damn. I wish I could be that amazing._ She knows for a fact that she’d never be able to be that magnanimous, if she’d been in Claire’s position. “I just don’t want to bother you when you’re on your way out.”

“That’s the best time to bother someone,” Claire says, and Darcy hides her nose in the top of the pillow and is silent. Claire sighs. “If you don’t want to talk about it, you can just tell me. I won’t be offended. Like I said, I’m not a therapist.”

“But you’re my friend,” Darcy says, and in that moment she realizes it’s true. Claire blinks once, and then again, before her smile takes a turn for the gentle. She props her chin in one hand.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Darcy sighs. She presses her face into the pillow (it smells like green apple shampoo and Tide) and swears under her breath. The words churn in the back of her mouth. Claire waits, quietly, tugging her fingers through the tuft of hair at the base of her braid. Finally, Darcy says, “It feels like we’re in a doom loop. Like…he lied to me about—about lots of things. And I’m furious with him. But I kind of lied to him too, about other important things. And I thought—he dates a lot, and I just never mentioned it, but I’m not sure if like…he actually knows. Or not.”

“Knows what?”

Darcy squashes the pillow into her face and screams. Then she lifts her head. “There are feelings,” she says. “They’re uncomfortable and squishy and I don’t like them, but they exist, and he might have noticed because he’s now a human lie detector, and that is a million kinds of not okay, and there, that’s it, no more sharing, I don’t like this sharing thing, can we not—is there booze?”

“It’s eight am.”

“It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

Claire snorts. She tugs her knee up against her chest, and sets her chin on top of it. “Do you want him to know you’re in love with him?”

“I did not say that,” Darcy says. Her voice cracks. “Did I say that? No. I am above such petty human banalities. You’ll never take me alive.”

“You sound Asgardian.”

“Well, maybe they have the right idea.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yes. No. I don’t know? I don’t want to fuck up our friendship.” She flops back onto the mattress. “This is such a dumb time for this. I can’t freak out about this now. Someone wants to kill me or make me his basement baby or whatever the fuck it is they’re going to do, and I’m freaking out because I kissed a guy and I don’t know if he _likes_ me likes me. I am such a failure as a human being.”

“Considering the amount of shit you have on your plate, I’m not surprised your brain is latching on to the easiest thing to deal with right now.” Claire rolls her eyes. “Get up. I have to make the bed.”

“You think this is _easy_?”

“No, but it’s easier than death threats.”

She can’t argue with that. Darcy rolls off the bed and onto the floor. Her arms hurt. Fuck that, her _core_ hurts. Though, to be fair, she had just heaved herself up onto a fire escape, like, six hours ago. She flops onto her back, and watches as Claire makes the bed. “I thought you said you weren’t a therapist.”

“I,” says Claire, “have been doing a lot of introspection the past few weeks. Who the fuck knows.”

Darcy makes an unhappy whale noise.

“Look, whatever happens, he’s still one of your best friends. Right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Then focus on that. Considering everything that’s happening, I feel like that matters more. Unless you’re into those dramatic dying confessions, which are always super-depressing and leave everyone very unhappy and confused. In which case I might come back down to the city and kill you before you do something like that, because seriously, no one needs the dead damsel.”

“I’m feeling so much love in this room right now,” Darcy tells the ceiling. The ceiling is nice. The ceiling has posters on it and doesn’t judge her about dumb feelings.

“I’m super nice to you, shut up.” Claire kicks Darcy lightly in the ankle. “Focusing on life and death and justice matters more at the moment. At least, that’s what I feel. Obviously you can feel differently about it, and that’s okay. But yeah. That’s my thought.” She hesitates. “And there’s one more thing you need to think about.”

Darcy opens her eyes, and cocks a brow.

“You need to seriously consider, if you do care about him that much, whether you can survive being with both Matt Murdock and the devil.” Claire’s mouth hardens. “I know I couldn’t. It’s up to you to find out if you can.”

She vanishes into the hall before Darcy can respond. Darcy takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly, shaky, her lungs trembling inside her.

“Holy shit.”

.

.

.

They take a cab to Penn Station, and by the end of it Claire has pressed an apartment key into Darcy’s hand and roped her into taking care of her plants. “And keep an eye on Santino,” she says, as she heaves her luggage out of the back of the cab. “He’s allowed in whenever, but if he starts to grow fungus or something from sitting on the couch too long kick him outside. If you need somewhere to lay low, go ahead. I’m pretty sure Fisk’s interest in me died with the Russians.”

Darcy’s not so sure, but she hooks the spare key on to her lanyard anyway, shoving it back into the bottom of her purse. The keys click against her gun.

She’s just waved goodbye to Claire at the doors and turned to hail another cab when she sees the _Bulletin._ Darcy digs five bucks out of the back pocket of her jeans and tosses them at the nearest newspaper guy, not waiting for her change. Her blonde wig is making her scalp itch like she has fleas. _Wilson Fisk’s Promise to the City,_ says the subheader, and there’s a photo on the front, of a tall, broad man with a shaved head and deep eyes. Behind him stands Wesley, Psycho Glasses Killer, his hands neatly behind his back and his eyes averted from the camera. It makes her guts clench. There’s a woman in the photo, too, right beside Fisk. Goodman, she realizes with a burst of triumphant _something_ , is nowhere to be seen. So Wesley had been serious about them being kicked out of the Rich Kid’s Club.

She texts Karen ( _why the fuck is he on the front page of Ben’s paper?_ ) and then Foggy ( _WHAT HAPPENED_?) before hailing a cab. For some reason cab drivers have been a lot more willing to pick her up now that she’s “blonde.” She’s not sure what the hell that’s about, but it’s something she’s willing to take advantage of.

She feels heavy, slipping into the back of the first cab who will take her over to Hell’s Kitchen (it’s getting harder to find people who will, especially lately). She feels like something’s crept into her marrow and laced her bones with titanium. _A man is dead, and I didn’t even have nightmares._ Blake had been one of Fisk’s men. He’d lied for Fisk, tried to hurt Karen for Fisk. He’d probably killed for Fisk. Still, she thinks, as Times Square flickers outside her window. She should feel at least some degree of—regret, maybe, or horror, that he’s dead and she heard it happen. She should care, even a little.

 _Blake was a bastard,_ she thinks, and then repeats it aloud. “Blake was a bastard.” The cab driver turns just a little, cocking an eyebrow at her, but then he pulls up the barrier between their seats and she’s cut off. It’s nice to know that people still give a shit.

Blake was a bastard, and she doesn’t care that he’s dead. She feels sick that he was murdered, and she’s probably never going to be able to eat marinara again, but the world is a better place without him in it. He was a crooked cop and a liar and probably a murderer himself, and now he’s gone. He can’t come back.

She props her chin in her hand, and watches the city go by.

Darcy stops in the bathroom that they share with the financial advisors or whoever now works in the office space besides theirs so she can disentangle herself from her wig and her chest binder, shoving them both into a plastic bag that she hides underneath the spare garbage can in the back of the last stall. _Disguise? Me? Nahhh, I know not of what you speak._ She’s pretty sure, judging by the number of coffee grounds in the sink, that Foggy just slept here. He’s wearing the same tie as yesterday, and his hair’s all messy.

“Hey,” she says, and leans over the back of his chair, peering at his computer screen. “Whatcha doing?”

“Fisk,” Foggy says, “is an asshole. That’s what I’m doing. I’m—I’m reveling in how much of an asshole he is. Look at this!” He scrolls through Google. “Fisk, poor fat kid with family problems! Fisk, abandoned by his father! Fisk, humanitarian! What the fuck is this. This is _bullshit_.”

“Hey, my dad abandoned me before I was even born, and I didn’t turn out to be some kind of megalomaniacal crime lord.”

“And I was a poor fat kid and look at me now. I have my very own office space. There’s a leak in the corner, but that just adds charm. And that’s not even touching the level of fatphobia in this, like. What the fuck.” He scrolls through the _Bulletin_ article again. “Jesus, this is all such total _bullshit._ ”

“Did you sleep at all?”

He makes an _oh god why did you ask that_ face. “What time is it?”

“Nine. Ish.”

“Then no, not at all.” Foggy looks ready to tear out his hair. “This is _bullshit_.”

“Okay.” She takes his wireless mouse, and shoves it into her pocket when he makes a grab for it. “Nope. We’re done. Come on. You’re leaving the office-cave. Go home and take a shower. Come back in an hour or two.”

Foggy rears back, and looks down his nose at her. “Are you saying I smell funny?”

“I’m saying that there is an aroma in this office and for the first time it’s not because of the mold. Or the nicotine.” She takes his computer for good measure while he’s distracted. “Go, Foggy. I’ll lock the doors while you’re not here if it makes you feel better, but seriously, you’ve passed _mildly smelly_ and hit _intense odor of corn chips._ ”

“You’re mean when you’re under threats of death,” says Foggy, but he stumbles off to find his shoes. Darcy locks the door behind him when he goes, and leans against it, letting out a long breath.

 _Normal._ She looks down at her chipping black nail polish, and then opens up her shitty laptop on the top of her desk. There’s a little alert in the corner of the screen, reminding her of the TMZ interview tomorrow morning. _Yeah, normal. How do I do normal, again?_

The door rattles. She jumps, and she’s about to snatch her gun out of her purse in the instant before she hears the rough sigh. “Jesus, Lewis, I know you’re in there. What’s with the locked door? I thought you guys opened at like…eight-thirty or whatever.”

Darcy blinks. “Kate?”

“The one and only. Let me in, I think the secretaries on this block are all eyeing my shoes.”

It’s not too far out of the realm of possibility. Darcy undoes the padlock and lets Kate in, locking the door up behind her again. Kate gives her a raised-eyebrow look over the top of her sunglasses. Her shoes are, indeed, worth eyeing. Darcy’s never seen anyone able to pull off heels that high without toppling like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. “What’s with the security?”

“It’s been an interesting few days.” Kate’s touched up the purple dye in her hair. The deep plum she remembers is now a vivid, eye-catching shade of heliotrope. Darcy’s really not sure how much bleach Kate had to use to get that color to catch and keep in her black hair, but it was probably very expensive. It looks really good. “Did you text me? I didn’t see it, my phone died last night and I can’t find the charge cord.”

More like she forgot it in her slap-dash rush through the apartment trying to get her shit together before Fisk had Blake killed. But she’s not saying that.

“Nah. Thought I’d drop by.” Kate takes off her glasses, hooking one of the earpieces through the V-neck collar of her shirt. “This place is interesting.”

“If by interesting you mean sketchy.” Darcy tips her head. “You want coffee?”

“God, yes, I had to get up early to get lectured by my dad from the Philippines and my eyes are still rolling in my skull.” Kate slinks after her like some kind of alley cat, watching with sharp eyes as Darcy measures out the grounds and starts the electric kettle. “You look like shit. Like, even more than usual. And I mean that in a nice way.”

“Gee, thanks.” Darcy wrinkles her nose at the number of mugs in the sink ( _Foggy, I swear to god, if you leave the dishes like this one more time—_ ) and then goes through the cabinets looking for clean ones. “I haven’t slept much the past few days. It’s been interesting.”

“Did Goodman send his goons after you again?” Kate says, and Darcy nearly fumbles the _Suck a dick, your honor_ mug. Kate presses her lips tight together. “Come on. I’m not stupid. I kind of put it together after seeing the way he acted around you, when we visited him. And it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s not the first time he’s done something like that. I’ve been talking with—with a few of the other girls that Rich attacked over the years. Mostly they’re scared because they had guys threatening them into silence. Makes sense.”

“I was going to tell you after the TMZ interview,” Darcy says, and for a second she hears Matt in the back of her head. _I was going to tell you._ “I didn’t want to freak you out, I guess.”

“I would have freaked out at the beginning, maybe.” Kate tugs on a lock of hair that’s fallen forward over her shoulder. “But I’ve been thinking a lot. I probably would have lied to you, too, if something like that had happened. I wasn’t in a very good place. Actually, I’m still not in a very good place. Like…I smashed a bunch of windows last night sort of place. But, whatever. Now at least I have another million reasons to hate the Goodmans. Y’know?”

Darcy sets the _Suck a dick, your honor_ mug on the countertop. It would be very, very unprofessional to hug the stuffing out of Kate Bishop, she tells herself. So unprofessional. The most unprofessional. Kate eyes her for a moment, and then sighs, loudly.

“If you’re gonna hug me get it over with, I still need to talk to you about TMZ.”

“Wow, I feel so welcome,” says Darcy, but she still wraps her arms around Kate and squeezes her hard. She’s bony and too-skinny, but the muscles in her arms stand out like wire cord, and when Kate hugs her back it makes her fractured rib cry like a baby. Kate, she finds, gives _excellent_ hugs. She thinks she can feel Kate smiling a little behind her hair.

“What about TMZ?” says Darcy, her chin still hooked over Kate’s shoulder. Kate prods her in the collarbone, and she finally lets go, turning to keep an eye on the electric kettle. “I thought we already talked about it.”

“Well, yeah, we did, but like—urgh.” Kate sighs. “I dunno. You’ve never been interviewed before, have you?”

“I have gone twenty-five years without that pleasure, yeah.” Darcy shrugs. “I figure it’s just, y’know, a conversation. With cameras, but it’s still a conversation. Sugar?”

“Gross, no.” Darcy pours boiling water into the press, watching as the grounds swirl into a tiny cyclone of caffeine and darkness. “Yeah, essentially that’s all it is. But—I mean. They might ask some pretty random shit. It’s TMZ, I’d be surprised if we touch on the Goodmans at all before an hour of dumb dating questions. Because they _love_ to ask me about my dating life.”

“And I’m sure you love to answer.” She leans her hips against the counter, crossing her arms over her chest. “I mean, if it’s worrying you, I can promise not to tell them to fuck off on a live feed. I’m pretty sure that part’s your job anyway, so.”

Kate snorts. “No, there’s just—I heard that they’re going to do a follow-up interview with some people from Landman and Zack. You know, Goodman’s lawyers?”

“Believe me, I know who Landman and Zack are.” _Oh, god, if they put Marci on TV I think Foggy might melt through his shoes._ “When did you hear about this?”

“Yesterday night. I may or may not pay interns at TMZ to tell me things before the big stories drop.” Kate shrugs. “It was like two in the morning, though, so I didn’t want to wake you up.”

Considering last night was the first time she’d slept a full seven hours straight without stirring once, Darcy appreciates that.

“Anyway, I don’t think they’ll actually try to have a double-up interview-wise, because there’s a bunch of legal issues with that and stuff, but I just wanted to give you a head’s up because it seemed kosher.” Kate accepts the mug of liquid energy, and wraps her hands around it, carefully. Her nails are cut short, and painted a vibrant silver. “So yeah. They want us there by nine am tomorrow. You know where we’re going, and everything?”

“Kate.” Darcy pours her own mug of coffee, and adds sugar and cream to it. “It’s in your penthouse. I know exactly where it is, I know how to get there, and I know what time I have to be there. What’s freaking you out so much about this?”

Kate fiddles with the bracelet around her wrist, and breathes in the steam from her coffee. “Nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Kate.”

“Look.” Kate sets her mug on the counter again. “I didn’t tell my dad this is happening. So he might, uh. He might get up in your face about it. I don’t know if he’ll even notice, but I’m pretty sure he has Google Alerts for my name and stuff, so if he does, I just wanna say, y’know. Leave him to me, I guess. That’s all.”

Darcy swallows her mouthful of coffee. Then she reaches out, and squeezes Kate’s elbow affectionately. “Your dad doesn’t scare me, Kate. You don’t have to worry about that.”

Kate’s smile is a bit wobbly, but it’s there. Darcy takes another sip of caffeine, and then says, “Why does he give you so much shit for this, anyway? Because of his image?”

“I don’t know.” Kate huffs. “He never likes it when I draw attention to myself. I think he gets it from his mom, honestly. He wouldn’t pay for my transition meds until I agreed to take his mom’s name. Locked down all my personal accounts until I agreed. I hated my grandmother. She was a massive fucking bitch. Never called me Kate, always insisted I was Callum, even when I wore a skirt or makeup or whatever.” Her mouth thins. “She used to treat my mom like shit, too. Y’know, she was—my dad married my mom without my grandmother’s permission, and she never let either of them forget it. Used to say that the mixing of the races was against what God intended. But soon as my mom died, she started hanging around again. _So_ much fun.”

“Jesus, what an asshole.”

“That’s the nicest thing you could call her.”

Out in the front room, the door rattles again. Darcy freezes, and Kate _sees_ it. Her eyes narrow, and she opens her mouth, but in the instant before she can speak Karen calls out, “Who’s in there? I can hear you moving around.”

“Just me.” Darcy leaves her mug on the counter, and goes to unlock the door again. “Foggy made me promise to keep it locked until someone else was here, and hi, you’re here, so’s Kate, we’re all just—a trio of here-ness.”

By the time the door swings open, Karen’s eyebrows have already clambered up into her hair. It’s actually super impressive. “I see,” she says, slowly, and waves at Kate. Kate’s eyebrows lift too. “How much coffee have you had?”

“Actually not that much. Hi, by the way. You’re wearing another Batman shirt. You should always wear Batman shirts, because they’re awesome.” She shuts the door behind Karen, and fights off the urge to lock it again. “Coffee?”

“Depends. Did they charge you for lacing it with crack, or was that just an extra for shits and giggles?”

Darcy pouts. “ _Mean._ ”

Karen sets her purse on her desk. “Ben’s coming over in like twenty minutes to talk about—to talk about stuff. Are you guys gonna be very long?”

“Not unless Kate decides she wants to intern here because of our aggregate level of fabulous, and even then she’s gonna have to fill out an application first.”

“Which I feel like I’d have to develop myself, because your copier is definitely older than I am,” Kate says, frowning a little.

“It’s also sentient and angry,” says Karen, and smiles. “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine.” Kate points at Darcy. “ _She’s_ crazy.”

“More than usual?”

“More than usual.”

“Everyone is being super mean to me right now and I don’t like it,” Darcy says. “Why did I make you coffee? I was nice to you and made you coffee and everything and you’re being _mean_.”

Kate shrugs, and sips her coffee, because she’s an asshole. Darcy frowns at her for a moment, and then something clicks in the back of her head. “Oh, right. You speak Japanese, right?”

Kate blinks. Then she blinks again. “Well, yeah, sorta. I mean. I grew up with it, my mom never spoke English very well. And then there’s Yoko, she keeps my grammar straight. Why?”

“Can you read it?”

“Again, sorta. What’s the point?”

Darcy holds up a finger, and then goes into her office. She can hear Karen and Kate muttering to each other outside, probably about how manic she’s _totally not being_ , but she ignores it. All the files Brett had given her were so mixed up and confusing that she’d eventually just resorted them all, marking each page with a case number and a date in the upper right hand corner. All the photos with writing on them, though—she wrenches the biggest folder out from the bottom of the stack—she’d stuck in one file, because it was easier. There are a few on the whiteboard, and she grabs those, too. When she returns, Kate’s eyes widen.

“Wow, okay. You found me photocopies.”

“I need to know what these say,” says Darcy, and turns over two of the photos. Mostly it’s photos of paperwork and graffiti, some of it in English, some of it in romanized Japanese, some of it in kanji all on its own, and all of it is almost completely unintelligible to her. “I’ve been looking on online dictionaries and stuff but I don’t know how to write things out to make it work because apparently Jisho is a _terrible website_ , and I feel like they’re important, sorta, so I just—yeah.”

“Where did you get these?” Kate turns over one of the photos, her forehead puckering. “Are these police photos?”

“I can hire you as an expert if it makes you feel better. I don’t know when I’d actually pay you, because we still haven’t quite broken even, but, y’know, if the legality is worrying you. I just need to know what they say.”

“You,” says Kate, “are very, very weird.” She puts the photos back in the file. “I recognize some of these, but I’ll ask Yoko. If asking Yoko is okay, I mean.”

“We can hire her too,” says Darcy, and behind her, Karen winces. “I mean, eventually. Pro bono is okay for Yoko right now, yeah?”

“From the state of this office, I think it’s gonna have to be. Yoko will survive.” Kate peers at the photos again. “Jesus, where did you get these?”

“I have people who have people who have people.” She claps Kate on the shoulder, and then, on second thought, goes up on tiptoe (because Kate’s heels are _very high_ ) and kisses her forehead. Kate blinks at her, and her hand flickers as if she wants to touch the spot, but is consciously stopping herself from doing it. “I’m really sorry to dump that on you and then force you to go but apparently things are happening and I don’t want you to have an even harder time of it. Okay? I’ll be at the penthouse by eight tomorrow, I promise.”

Kate stares at her. Then she meets Karen’s eyes over Darcy’s head. “If she has a heart attack in the near future, call me, okay? I can pay for her hospitalization.”

“We’d appreciate that,” says Karen, who’s still staring at Darcy with a very weird expression on her face. “I’m pretty sure we still don’t have health insurance, either.”

“Both of you suck.” She pushes lightly at Kate’s arm. “Go. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“This is very weird,” Kate says loudly, but she goes. “I am suspicious.”

“I gave you things to do. Go do the things.”

“I’ll figure out what’s going on, y’know.”

“And you’re perfectly free to do so as long as you _go_.”

“Fine!” says Kate, but she’s half-smiling. “Fine, I’m going. Do you think if I wait on your stoop I could get Ben to tell me?”

“We are talking about the same Ben Urich, right?” Karen rolls her eyes. “You’d have better luck prying a bent nail out of a sunken ship.”

“Go home, Katie-Kate.” Kate makes a face. Darcy ignores it. “Go shoot arrows at things and be awesome and tell me all about Japanese grammar via text, but _go home_.”

“Fine.” Kate stops in the doorway, and looks down at Darcy from her stilts. “Be safe, okay? I don’t know what’s going on, but—you guys just be careful.”

And she loves Kate for that, she really does. “You too,” she says, and hugs her one last time before shutting the door behind her. The _click-click_ of Kate’s shoes fades down the hall, and it’s only once she hears the door to the street shut that Darcy relaxes.

Karen’s still staring at her.

“What?”

Karen shakes her head. “Nothing. You’re high, I think. That’s all.”

“High on disappointment,” Darcy replies, and goes to wipe down her whiteboard and start over. “Tell me when Ben gets here. We need to figure out how and when we can snipe Fisk without anybody really noticing.”

“Amen to that,” says Karen. Darcy’s not sure if she’s joking or not. The sad thing is, she doesn’t really care.

.

.

.

She decides as soon as Ben leaves that she never, ever wants Ben Urich to be mad at her. Ever. He’s not all that intimidating physically, but at the same time he seems to exude that aura that only belongs to very capable, very confident people that if you fuck with them, you will regret that your egg was ever fertilized, in vitro or otherwise. Pissed? Sure. Grumpy? Yeah, that she can deal with. Anger, though…no. Not ever. Not _ever_.

In other words, Ben scares her, but it’s in a comfortable, I’ve-got-your-back-bro sort of way, so whatever. She’ll take being scared of Ben Urich over being murdered by Wesley and Wilson Fisk, any day.

She’s given over most of her photo project to Kate, so when Ben the Ray of Sunshine slips out with a promise to text Karen later that afternoon (“I’ll tell you if I find anything. I doubt that I will. Don’t think there’s anything _to_ find. These bastards know what they’re doing. But I’ll let you know.”) she returns to her overview of the Goodman case. Rich and Robbie might technically be out of reach (not out of reach of her favorite paintball gun, but that’s a different matter entirely), but Mathias Lynch and Clark Jenson aren’t. In fact, they’re currently in their apartment a few blocks away from Columbia proper. Or, they should be. It’s possible they’re out drinking and raping other women like Kate, but she prefers to think that they’re having a night in of _Sons of Anarchy_ and spa treatments. She’s pretty sure that’s what Satan does on his days off, too.

Still, as hard as she tries, she can’t think too much about Jenson and Lynch. Darcy’s too involved in Not Looking at Matt. Yes, okay, Claire’s right, it’s better to act normal and concentrate on saving her own life, saving Kate’s case, rather than the fact that last night she made out with her best friend, the devil of Hell’s Kitchen, against a wall in an alley. (There are so many Catholic jokes she can make about this, it’s not even funny.) Still, her brain is being dumb, and won’t let her focus on anything else. Instead, it’s replaying everything in HD 1080p. Like how his breathing had stuttered against her mouth. Her brain won’t let that go at all. Or how he’d pressed his thumb into the sensitive spot on the underside of her jaw, unerringly, as if he’d always known it was there. It won’t let go of that, either. She feels like it shows, like it’s blazing on her face like a spotlight. _I kissed Matt Murdock last night._ It’s so fucking stupid she could cry.

She only realizes she’s touching her lips thoughtfully when across from her desk, Matt clears his throat, and Foggy asks if his coffee’s too hot. She keeps her hands on her files after that, because she is _normal._ Absolutely normal. Abnormality can suck her dick.

Okay. She needs to think about other things. Non-Matt-ish things. More rational, reasonable, diabolical things. She can think of Tully, on his fucking deserted island with his terrible volleyball and all of his coconuts and pineapples. She pins the _Bulletin_ onto her whiteboard with a magnet. On one side of Fisk, there’s Wesley: Wesley, the woman named Vanessa. On the other side, the darker side, there’s the Russians, dead now; there’s the Goodmans, who seem content to create their tiny disasters and not affect the rest of the Kitchen; there’s the Triad, with their drugs that they’re funneling to Rich Goodman and his friends. (She draws a line in red marker between the name _Rich_ and the word _Triad_. Karen makes a startled noise, but nobody else reacts.) And between the two (she centers it on her board, shifting Fisk over to the side) she writes _YAKUZA_ and circles it. Darcy taps the cap of the marker against her lower lip, staring at it.

“Tully’s a dead end,” says Foggy, putting his fifth coffee refill down on the edge of Matt’s desk. She’s pretty sure that he only pretended to nap, just to stay on her good side, but since she’s done that to him before she’s not going to mention it. “We already talked about that.”

“Yeah, I know.” She chews on the lid for a second. No matter what Kate does or doesn’t find in those photos, whatever they can or can’t manage to find about Fisk, the Goodmans are going to have to come first for her. Fisk is important, taking him down is important, she knows that, but Kate—she needs to help Kate. And she can help Kate even without dealing with Fisk.

“Tully’s a dead end,” says Matt, passing a hackey sack from hand to hand. “The Goodmans aren’t.”

Foggy groans, and leans back. His spine cracks. “ _Matt_ ,” he says. “Jesus.”

“No, he’s right.” Darcy doesn’t look at Matt. “The Goodmans are loose cannons. Wesley—Wesley basically said that they were a necessary evil, because neither he nor his _employer—_ ” she crooks her fingers “—wanted to be associated with rapists. But Goodman and Okamura haven’t broken up, so the Goodmans are still in play. They’ve met with Wesley, they’re working with the yakuza, they’ve probably at least seen Fisk. That’s a link we can use.” Her nails dig into her palms. “We need to find something on them before Fisk realizes that too.”

Karen snaps her fingers a few times. “I read something—hand me that file on the execution from October 2012?”

“What, the docks murder?” Darcy tugs the file out of the stack, and passes it over. “Since when have you been reading my files?”

“Since I’m interested and I get bored when I’m here on my own all day.” Karen pages through the file, and then taps the paper. “There, that. Security cameras caught footage of men presumed to be yakuza, from their tattoos, dragging some Russian mobsters into a warehouse on the docks. Gunshots were caught on the audio, but since they weren’t actually _seen_ killing the Russians, their lawyers managed to get them off.”

“Snakes,” says Foggy, and sneaks one of the photos from the file. “These are dudes I would not want to meet in a dark alley.”

“Give me that,” says Karen, and Foggy hands the picture over. “Look at this, though. They were picked up in a stolen vehicle that was later found abandoned. The registration and plates were gone, and they’d tried to score the VIN off with acid, but whoever did it messed up. The police tracked the car back to a travel agency in Chelsea, um, Andromeda Fare.”

“I’m hearing a thought,” says Darcy. “I’m hearing a very important thought.”

“Andromeda Fare.” Foggy’s already pulled it up on his computer. “Subsidiary of Rogue Travelers. Not independent, huh.”

“Yeah, and Rogue Travelers—” Karen spins Foggy’s computer around, types some stuff in, and then flashes the screen at them “—has a Jenson on the board.”

Her mouth turns sticky. “How the fuck didn’t I see that?” She leans forward, stares at the name. _Matthew Jenson._ When she surfs through Clark Jenson’s (open, unsecured) Facebook page, she finds Matthew listed as _uncle._ “How the _fuck_ didn’t I see that?”

“To be fair, you’ve kind of had some stuff on your mind,” says Foggy.

Darcy flings her arms around Karen’s shoulders, squeezing her hard. Her blood is jumping in her veins. “Oh my god,” she says. “Oh my _god_. I love you. You’re _perfect._ ”

Karen laughs. “Well, that’s nice to hear.”

“You’re _perfect_ ,” says Darcy again, and kisses the top of Karen’s head, hard. “Oh my god you are _flawless_. Live with me forever, I can’t survive without your awesome.”

“It could be disproven,” says Matt, slowly. “The car was supposedly stolen. Even if it was a gift that they messed with later, it’s a tenuous connection.”

“But it’s still a _connection_ , Matt.” Fuck playing devil’s advocate. She’s on cloud fucking nine thanks to Karen Fucking Page. “If they weren’t already freaked out by what I—what _we’ve_ found, then they wouldn’t be trying to scare me so much. If we push on this—”

“You could end up dead,” Matt snaps. It’s the first time he’s said a direct word to her since he came in. “Like Wesley threatened you. _Two days ago._ ”

“Yeah, uh, that is something I am not in favor of,” says Foggy. “Despite Karen’s awesome.”

“Thank you,” says Karen.”

“Yeah, well, when Mrs. Cardenas gets thrown out of her home and I lose the suit against the Goodmans because I don’t have enough evidence, we can talk again about being cautious.”

“There’s a difference between being reckless and being stupid.”

That stings. “And, what, I’m being stupid?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Yeah, well, sorry, but getting lectured about being reckless by _you_ doesn’t work out so well.” Her voice is getting louder and louder, and she can’t seem to stop it. “This is a _good thing_ , Matt. This is _good_. I don’t see what the problem is!”

“Guys.” Karen stands, and puts a hand out to Darcy. “Okay. Um. Breathe.”

“It’s too thin a connection!” Matt says, ignoring Karen completely. “If you take this into court they’ll eviscerate you, and then where will that leave Kate? And the investigation into Fisk? And Mrs. Cardenas?”

Foggy’s eyes are getting bigger and bigger. She’s never really fought with Matt before, not like this. Not like the other night, and not like now. Her nails bite into her palms. “Well, if we just sit around, what the hell else are we supposed to find? Or am I supposed to leave that for someone else to do, and get hurt over, and possibly _die_ over? I’m not about to fucking do that!”

“I’m not saying that!” Matt pushes his glasses up against his forehead, pinches the bridge of his nose. “I don’t want you to get in over your head—”

“Guess what? _We’re all in over our heads._ And you’re not the boss of me, Matt, so you can take your—all of that, and just—”

“ _Hey_ ,” Karen says, in a voice that somehow manages to echo without getting very loud at all. Darcy shuts up. Foggy actually looks frightened. “I don’t know what the fuck you two are fighting about, but this is _not_ the time. I don’t care if I have to lock you in a fucking closet, _deal with your shit_ , because we don’t have the time for this.”

“Karen—” Matt says, probably marshaling his arguments— _god, why did I have to be a lawyer?_ —and then he goes completely quiet. In the next second, they hear a soft knock at the door. Karen brushes her hair back out of her face, and somehow her look of disappointment makes Darcy hurt worse than she has in ages.

“Get over it,” says Karen, and then she stalks out of the room to open the main door. Foggy looks at them both for a long moment, and then sighs.

“Look,” he says. “I don’t know what happened, but—but Karen’s right. We can’t afford to be fighting amongst ourselves right now. Whatever happened, can—you need to work it out.” He wavers, as if he wants to say something else. Then he claps Matt on the shoulder, touches Darcy’s wrist lightly with his fingertips, and follows after Karen. The door shuts behind him, and that, somehow, hurts worse. They’re alone.

“Darcy,” Matt says, but Darcy’s already grabbing her shit, shoving it into her bag. “Where are you going?”

“To talk to Brett.” She snatches her lanyard off of the desktop, and throws it into her purse. It clinks against the flick knife that’s been hanging around in the bottom of her bag, like flotsam, and on second thought, she grabs it and shoves it into the right cup of her bra. At least if she can’t get to her gun super-fast, she’ll have one other weapon on her. “I want to ask him if they looked into the Andromeda angle. If they haven’t, then we might have something.”

“You could call him, y’know.”

He’s right. Darcy squeezes the strap of her purse, hard. Then she settles it over her shoulder. “Yeah, I could. If I stay here any longer, though, I’m going to scream. And that would probably be bad.”

Matt comes around the edge of his desk, and stops. “Because of me,” he says, and Darcy takes a deep breath through her nose.

“Yeah, well, you being a hypocritical dick isn’t helping, I can say that much.”

He huffs. “Yeah. Okay. I’m being a hypocrite. But we _all_ agreed not to go anywhere alone. And walking right into the police station—which we already know is full of Fisk’s men—without backup or much of a plan is kind of suicide.”

“ _God_.” She lets go of the doorknob. “I know that, okay? I’m just—” He’s standing too close. He’s an arm’s length away, and he’s still too close. “Could you—um.”

Matt’s eyebrows lift. “Could I what?”

“Never mind.” She shakes her head. “I’ll call Brett. Okay? Just—” Her throat hurts. “—I know you’re, like, a super-badass fighter-dude, apparently, but you telling me I can and can’t do things is—it’s unacceptable. We’ve talked about this before when you were Mike, and we will talk about it again and again until it finally clicks, because I _will not be told what to do_. I’m not a kid, and even if I can’t, like—do a back-flip from a standing position, I know what I’m doing, and I’m not stupid. And you need to stop being so fucking reckless and going off on your own without telling anyone when you _said you wouldn’t._ You make us promise, you have to promise too. You go anywhere, you go out—patrolling, or whatever it is you do, _you tell me_. Okay?”

Matt takes his glasses off, and kneads at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Then he nods, once, jerky and quick, and her hands relax. Darcy tucks her hair behind her ears, wishing she didn’t have to wear a wig to go home, wishing that things were still simple, wishing that she’d never left college. But then she wouldn’t know Karen, or Kate, or know the truth about Matt, and she’d not give any of that up. Not for a whole lifetime of peace. “Um.” The words stick in her throat. “Can we not—um. I don’t like fighting with you. Can we not do that?”

Matt blinks at her, and then nods again, fist pressed against his lips. “I don’t like fighting with you, either.”

They’re caught in a stalemate, all at once. Matt stand quite still, leaning back against his desk, rubbing at his jaw mechanically. Darcy holds herself on the balls of her feet, ready to flee if she has to. If the silence stretches any longer, it’s going to get awkward. “Well,” she says. “Um. There’s that, then. I should probably go call Brett.”

 _“_ I think we need to talk,” says Matt, almost at the same time, his voice very low and devil-ish. It makes the skin creep along her spine. “About what happened last night.”

Darcy lets out a _whoosh_ of air that makes her chest hurt. “You mean Blake? Because I’m already guaranteed like fifty million years of therapy for everything that happened before I turned fifteen, so—”

“Darcy.”

So much for pretending everything’s normal. All good feelings to Claire, she’s not sure if she ever really wanted to try. “If you’re saying we should talk about it here, then that is a very bad idea, for so many reasons, I can’t even—”

“No, not here.” Matt licks his lips. Then his mouth quirks. “I’d say my place, but that sounds like—well. It doesn’t sound very good.”

“No, your place is fine.” _The whole place smells of you_ , Stick had said. To say that the thought of that doesn’t make something deep under her collarbone curl up and purr like a cat would be a very, very bad lie. “After work maybe.” There’s a smile trembling on her lips. “Maybe before you go and act like Mephistopheles, though.”

“Is that what we’re calling it now?”

She snickers. “I reserve full right to mock you about your weird nickname.”

“I didn’t actually pick it, y’know.”

“That’s what makes it so hilarious.” Darcy opens her mouth, and then closes it again. Is she a bad person, a weak person, for—well, not forgiving him, exactly, but being content with him again so quickly? Probably.

She doesn’t _want_ to be angry with Matt. She is, but she doesn’t like being that way. _Therapy, Lewis,_ a little voice says in the back of her head. _You should be having it._  

Whatever, little voice.

“You okay?” Matt cocks his head. “You went quiet.”

“Uh.” She coughs. “Yeah. M’fine. We should probably—deal with whatever’s going on out there.”

“It’s Mrs. Cardenas,” says Matt, and straightens. Suddenly he’s a lot closer to her than he was before, and when the hell did he get so _fucking tall_? She thought guys were supposed to stop growing at twenty-two or whatever. “She’s come to tell us something about Tully.”

“We should—um.” Darcy shuts her eyes. _Keep breathing normally, god damn you._ “We should go out and see what she has to say.”

“Yeah, probably,” says Matt, but he doesn’t move. No, that’s a lie; he lifts a hand, head bent towards hers, and catches her wrist, gently, so she can pull away without any effort. The hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention. When she doesn’t yank away, he starts swiping his thumb in slow circles against her skin. There are still a few little chips of Mesmerized Blue on his nails.

Fuck breathing normally. Her lungs creak. Darcy clenches her other hand around the straps of her bag until her knuckles hurt.

“This is like…the worst possible time for this, isn’t it,” she says. Matt’s jaw locks, and he starts to pull away, but Darcy turns her hand palm-side up and matches him grip for grip. She can feel his pulse against her skin. He goes still, and even though he’s blind, she’s never been watched more intently than she’s being watched right this moment. Darcy hesitates, and then strokes the knob of bone in his wrist once, twice. “I mean, I’m—I’m still angry with you. And I feel like that should be more important.” She stops. “It should probably be more important, but—I don’t know. Everything is mixed up right now.”

“You have a right to be angry with me,” Matt says quietly, and she nearly kisses him again. Just for that, she nearly kisses him, and oh, god, she _really_ doesn’t like this having-feelings thing. It makes everything so fucking complicated. He pulls away, just a little, but rather than letting her hand drop he catches it, so that suddenly they’re palm to palm, his thumb slotted between her pinky and ring fingers. She wonders how Matt is experiencing it, what with his hi-def everything. It feels like her nerve endings are on fire. Matt ghosts his index finger along her knuckles, and Darcy swallows hard. “If you need more time, then we can wait. I mean it, Darcy. I’m guessing it’s—a lot to process.”

“Not as much as you’d think,” she says. “In a way it makes the picture a lot clearer. Though if I say I haven’t lost any sleep over it I’d be the worst bullshitter ever, and I’m in the legal profession.”

Matt’s mouth knots up. She wishes she could see his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and she swallows hard. “I don’t know how I can say how sorry I am.”

“I told you that sorries don’t fix things,” she says. “But they help a lot.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

She can’t fight the urge to reach up, and smooth some of the wrinkles out of his forehead with her thumb. Then she traces his eyebrow down to his jaw, because she can. Matt tilts his head into the touch, his eyes half-closed, lashes dusting his cheek. There’s a scab from the fight with Stick against the side of his nose. She wants to press her lips to it. She doesn’t.

“We really need to go and see what they’re talking about,” he says, low and husky and utterly foreign, but in the best possible way. “Because otherwise I’m going to kiss you, and I feel like it’s going to set a bad precedent for office professionalism.”

Her mouth feels like it’s made of paper. Darcy swallows again, and then again, licking her lips. She digs her nails hard into the back of his hand. “That’s mean,” she says, slightly breathless. “That’s _mean_.”

“I never said I was nice,” says Matt, and the corners of his mouth have turned up. Darcy huffs, and runs her thumb over the line of his cheekbone before drawing back, and trying to gain her balance as subtly as possible. He touches his hand to the small of her spine as they return to the main room, to Foggy and Karen and Mrs. Cardenas and the harshness of reality, and it feels like a secret. Not a bad secret, not a corrosive secret, but a _shared_ secret. A secret full of possibles.

_Well. Goodbye, normality._

.

.

.

“So,” says Mrs. Cardenas. “You and Señor Matthew, hm?”

Darcy, who’s fumbling through her purse looking for her burner phone (which for some reason she still has), chokes on her own spit. Since Matt had gone off to investigate Vanessa Marianna, Foggy’s Spanish was actually terrible ( _biblioteca?_ Seriously?) and Karen was in major research mode, she’d volunteered to make sure that Mrs. Cardenas made it home all right. She has her gun (which Matt knows) and her knife (which Foggy knows) and besides: it’s still light out, there’s been no hint of anyone watching her all day, _and_ she’s back in her wig, which had made Mrs. Cardenas’ mouth pucker but other than that had engendered no reaction from anyone. They’ve been walking quietly for the past fifteen minutes, mostly because they’re both deep in thought, and it’s been pretty chill, actually. Still, she’s pretty sure she would have left escort duty to Foggy if she’d known that she was going to be subjected to the Foggy-and-Karen treatment. “Me and—no.” That’s so not a lie. Her ears aren’t burning. “Well, not really. I don’t think. _Que loco, señora, por que dices eso_?”

Mrs. Cardenas gets a funny look on her face. “Your Spanish is—” She frowns. “ _Acento_. _Eres puertorriqueña_?”

“ _Mi professor en la universidad era puertorriqueño_ ,” says Darcy, and Mrs. Cardenas nods, as if to say, _Ah_. “ _Mi padre era Guatemalteca. Eso dicen._ ”

Her face clears. “Your father,” she says, in English. “He—ay, _la palabra_. He leave?”

“Before I was born.” Mrs. Cardenas’ eyebrows crinkle again, so she translates. “ _Antes de mi nacimiento_.”

“ _Estúpido_ ,” Mrs. Cardenas grunts. They turn down her street, and she pats Darcy’s arm. “ _Eres una buena chica. Olvídese de su pendejo, cariña._ ”

Darcy smiles. “ _Gracias, Elena._ He’s never really mattered, so I don’t think about him much. _Tengo a mi hermana, y amigos. Estoy bien._ ”

“ _Hermana_?”

“ _Mi prima._ She’s more like my sister, though. _Tienes familia_?”

Elena shakes her head. “My son, he live— _en Portugal._ For work. _Y mi marido murío, Dios lo bendiga._ ”

“ _Lo siento_.”

“ _Está bien_.” Mrs. Cardenas pulls her keys from her battered, flowery purse, and unlocks the front door to her building, stepping aside to let Darcy pass. Apparently, she’s getting invited to dinner. Darcy slips through into the flickering hallway, and waits until Elena’s inside before pulling off her wig and shoving it into her bag. “But you avoid my question.”

“What question?”

“Señor Matthew _._ ” She twines her first two fingers together, and Darcy’s caught between laughing hysterically and wanting to run the other direction. “Together?”

“No.” She bites her lip. “Um. _Estamos luchando._ ”

“Fighting?” says Mrs. Cardenas. Her eyebrows dance. “Or _fighting?_ ”

Oh my god. Mrs. Cardenas is the best, but in the worst possible way. “No,” Darcy says, but she’s half-laughing. “Not—no. I don’t know.”

“He is good,” says Mrs. Cardenas, looking pleased. “All of you, good people. _Todos ustedes merecen ser feliz._ ”

They mount the stairs to the third floor, and Darcy steps over the druggie at the end of the hallway. He tips his head sideways, watching them pass with eyes like marbles. “ _Muchas gracias, Elena._ ”

“ _De nada._ ” Elena smiles. “You come in?”

Darcy glances down the hall again. The druggie’s heaving himself to his feet, slowly, as if he’s half-asleep still. “Yeah,” she says. “I have time, I think.”

“ _Bien_ ,” says Elena, and she fumbles her keys.

It’s like in a horror movie, when the lights flash and everything happens in split-second frames. The wood creaks under her feet. Elena’s keys hit the floor. There’s a tearing sound. Darcy whips her purse around, and hits the druggie in the head. Red wells up on Elena’s forearm. The gun’s in her hand before she can remember grabbing it. The mugger lifts his knife again, and she has a flash of his eyes, huge, pupils blown, hair mussed. She fires, and he screams. Blood spatters the floor.

She’s shot him in the leg, she realizes, as he hits the ground. She can’t bring herself to feel guilty about it.

Time steadies again, and so does her vision. There’s the mugger, on the floor, rocking back and forth with his hands around the hole in his leg. There’s Elena, her arm bleeding, her eyes wide and one hand over her heart. And then there’s Darcy, who clasps her other hand over the base of the gun, and keeps it trained on the mugger’s head.

“You move, I shoot you again,” she says. “Because I’m really fucking done with this shit.”

“ _Madre de Dios,_ ” says Elena, and without taking her eyes off of the mugger, Darcy flicks her fingers at her.

“Go into your apartment, Elena. _Llama a la policía, sí_?”

“I stay with you,” Elena says, in a firm, very Babushka-like _don’t fuck with me, girlie_ sort of voice. There’s no time to argue about it. Darcy jerks her gun.

“Keep your ass on the floor,” she says, and the mugger freezes halfway to his feet again. “Who sent you here?”

“Jesus Christ.” His teeth are rotting. Heroin addict, maybe, or coke. His skin is grimy, hair stained. “You fucking _shot_ me, you crazy bitch, Jesus—”

“ _Drop the knife_ ,” Darcy snarls, and the druggie scrambles to do as she says. Elena swipes it up, holding it like someone who’s been trained, careful to keep the blade away from her once-pristine shirt. Darcy blinks. “Elena?”

“My father, he was—” she frowns. “ _En Inglés_ —freedom fighter? In Dominican Republic. He teach me.”

 _Against Trujillo_? Holy shit. “ _Mantenga el cuchillo_ , Elena.”

“Mm,” says Elena, and flips the knife in a dizzying spiral before snatching it out of the air with her good hand. Darcy has to bite her tongue to keep from smiling. _So, Elena Cardenas is a badass. Good to know._

“I don’t understand Spanish,” says the druggie. He looks like he’s about to cry. Or possibly piss himself. “Please don’t hurt me, I didn’t want to, _please—_ ”

“Did someone send you?” Her arms are shaking. She cups the base of her gun in her other hand. “To hurt Elena. Did someone send you?”

“Jesus, it was just a job, okay? They made me—”

He stops. His eyes widen. Something—some twitch or creak or base fucking instinct—has her turning without thinking, squeezing the trigger. The roar of the shot makes Elena yelp. Someone else screams. An arm snaps around her throat, pinching, squeezing, cutting off her air, but she digs her fingernails into the sensitive nerve between the guy’s thumb and forefinger and he lets her go with a roar. The druggie’s vanished, clattering down the stairs, but there’s one man with a gun trained on Elena’s skull, and another, the one who grabbed her, with a blade at the ready. She keeps her gun raised, clasping it with both hands, trying to keep her arms steady.

“Miss Lewis,” says the first. She knows those cheekbones. _Holy shit._ Hironobu Orihara came to deal with her himself. There’s a tear in his shirt sleeve, blood running down his arm. Her stray shot, she supposes. Her lungs are trembling. “Put the gun down or we shoot her in the head.”

Darcy looks at Elena. Her lips are moving in total silence, as if she’s praying. Her eyes are closed. “How do I know you won’t still shoot her even if I put my gun down?”

Orihara glances at his friend, the one with the knife, and with a sour look he shoves the blade back into his boot sheath.

“Not enough,” Darcy says. Her voice is hard. She glances at Elena again, and then says, “If I promise to go with you quietly, you’ll leave her alone?”

“We have you,” says Orihara. She searches his face. “We no longer have any interest in her.”

“You have me for what?” There’s a knife in her bra and a gun in her hands. She shouldn’t feel like she’s helpless. “For luring him out? He’s smarter than that.”

“The Russians did a very good job in showing that he’s actually really not.” Orihara stares at her, and then turns, slowly, so that he’s pointing a gun at her, and she’s pointing a gun at him, and Elena is left unmarked. “And besides: I wish to speak with you.”

Darcy swallows hard. Her throat prickles.

“Send the old woman away,” he says. “We’re not touching her.”

“You swear?”

“I swear,” he says, and she believes him. Darcy squeezes her gun one last time. Then, slowly, she raises her hands, so that her gun is pointed at the ceiling, and her core is open to attack. Orihara doesn’t do a thing. He presses his lips together, as if to keep himself from smiling.

“Elena,” Darcy says. “Go into your apartment. Lock the door behind you. None of your men are in there?” she asks Orihara, and he shakes his head.

“She’s safe.”

Elena chokes. “Darcy—”

“Do it. _Por favor_ , Elena.” She makes herself smile. “ _Está bien_.”

“ _No mientes bien_ ,” Elena says in a shaking voice, but she does what Darcy says. She unlocks her door with shaking hands, slips inside, and shuts it behind her. Darcy closes her eyes, and lets Orihara’s goon take the gun from her. It goes into his back pocket. When he frisks her, he misses the knife in her bra. _God bless underwires._

“Walk,” says Orihara, and Darcy clenches her hands into fists. She should be hysterical, but there’s only some sort of icy knot in the base of her throat, stilling her heartbeat, making her cold. “Down the hall.”

She’s only three steps past them when something hard slams down onto the back of her neck. She doesn’t remember hitting the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please don't hate me
> 
> TRANSLATIONS  
> Claire: _La bolsa, por favor._ (The bag, please.)
> 
> “Well, not really. I don’t think. _Que loco, señora, por que dices eso_? (That's crazy, why would you say that?)”  
>  "Your Spanish is— _Acento. Eres puertorriqueña_? (Your accent. Is it Puerto Rican?)”  
>  “ _Mi professor en la universidad era puertorriqueño. Mi padre era Guatemalteca. Eso dicen._ (My professor at university was Puerto Rican. My dad was Guatemalan. I think.)”  
>  "Your father. He—ay, _la palabra_. (The word.) He leave?"  
>  "Before I was born. _Antes de mi nacimiento_. (Before I was born.)"  
>  " _Estúpido. Eres una buena chica. Olvídese de su pendejo, cariña._ (Idiot. You're a good girl. Forget that dumbass, sweetheart.)"  
>  “ _Gracias_ , Elena. (Thank you, Elena.) He’s never really mattered, so I don’t think about him much. _Tengo a mi hermana, y amigos. Estoy bien._ (And I have my sister, and my friends. I'm okay.)”  
>  “ _Hermana?_ (Sister?)”  
>  “ _Mi prima._ She’s more like my sister, though. _Tienes familia?_ (My cousin. She's more like my sister, though. Do you have family?)”  
>  “My son, he live— _en Portugal_ (in Portugal). For work. _Y mi marido murío, Dios lo bendiga._ (And my husband is dead, God bless him.)”  
>  “ _Lo siento_. (I'm sorry.)”  
>  “ _Está bien._ (It's okay.) But you avoid my question.”  
>  “What question?”  
> “Señor Matthew. Together?”  
> “No. Um. _Estamos luchando._ (We're fighting.)”  
>  “Fighting? Or fighting?”  
> “Not—no. I don’t know.”  
> “He is good. All of you, good people. _Todos ustedes merecen ser feliz._ (You all deserve to be happy.)”
> 
> Finally:
> 
> " _Llama a la policia._ " (Call the police.)  
> " _No mientes bien._ " (You don't lie well/it's a bad lie.)


	12. The Crucifixion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MAJOR TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR: TORTURE. This is the chapter that earns the Graphic Depictions of Violence warning. Including: bondage, gagging, knife wounds, breaking bones, brutality, psychological torture, physical violence, and discussion of past assault. Also, Matt's fight with Nobu. 
> 
> Also rated for feels. 
> 
> ALL OF THE VANESSA PARALLELS. 
> 
> I've read this thing through a million times, but as always, I apologize for spelling/spacing/grammar glitches. I'm sure I'll find more once I read through the actually posted version, because life hates me.

Books are wrong. You don’t dream, when you’re knocked unconscious. There’s the world, and then it’s gone, and when you wake up again it’s impossible to tell just what is real.

The drumbeat that’s settled in behind her eyes, that’s real, she thinks. The bite of plastic around her wrists, that’s real too. When she flexes her fingers, it pinches. Her boots are gone, and her socks are damp and cold. She can taste cloth on her tongue. When she opens her eyes, she can only see fabric. The inside of a pillowcase, maybe.

It doesn’t click, for a moment. Then it’s as if her brain explodes. Fire surges through her veins, searing, consuming. Darcy screams, wrenching at the covering over her face. It’s not tied to her head, so after jabbing herself in the eye once or twice (and where the fuck are her glasses?) she gets it off. She’s flat on her back on a cold concrete floor, a single bulb suspended on a raw cord over her head, swinging slowly back and forth in the damp, chilly air. There’s a table to her right, with papers on top—or she thinks there are papers on top, she can’t really see very well right now. There are wooden stands with canvases on them, too, and when she rolls to get her feet under her, she knocks one to the ground with a crash.

“You’re noisy when you want to be,” says a voice, and when Darcy stumbles around, she can see dark hair and the glint of glasses in the dim light of the bulb. Wesley. He touches something on his chest, and then reaches forward. Darcy rears back so fast that she trips and falls on her ass, a canvas jabbing into her thigh. Her memories are muzzy, and her head is pounding. _What the fuck happened?_ “Calm down,” says Wesley. “It’d be pointless to kill you right now. We have to talk about a few things, first.”

She can’t say anything—there’s a kerchief or shirt or _something_ rolled up and stuffed into her mouth—but she hopes that the look she gives him is eloquent enough. She still jerks away when he crouches in front of her, but Wesley grips her by the back of the head and slides her glasses on with about as much gentleness as a rattlesnake. She wouldn’t be surprised if she bruises. Once it’s done, Wesley claps his hands to his knees, still crouched, watching her. There’s an edge to the smirk on his mouth that makes her want to drive her nails into his eyes.

“You know,” he says, conversationally, as if she’s not zip-tied and gagged, “I would have thought you were smarter than this. Though I do have to say the wig was a nice touch. And the chest binder. It threw the man I set on your tail off for a full seventeen hours. I’m fairly certain that’s some sort of record.” He reaches out, and tugs on a strand of her hair. “You don’t make a very good blonde, though, sorry to say.”

“Fuck you,” Darcy says, but through the gag, it just comes out as “Fg.”

“You’ve been asleep for six hours.” Wesley stands, and rests one hand against the papers on the table before opening a tablet. “Your friends have become quite hysterical. The police are looking for you, too, but you know how well that search must be going. Tell me, should I thank _you_ for killing Blake, or should I thank the devil instead?”

 _Nice try._ She rolls her eyes. Wesley actually laughs.

“Yes, well. The press must have their story. And considering the fact that you’re aiding and abetting a wanted terrorist, well, I don’t think any court would be too inclined to give you a second look.”

Wesley goes quiet for a moment, scrolling through his tablet. Darcy turns her face to the painting she knocked down, the one that’s jamming into her hip like a weapon. It’s oil on canvas, a photo-exact replica of the view from the top of the Empire State Building. There are even tiny people in the windows, dark figures framed in light. She can’t tell, in the dim light, if it’s signed. The zip-ties are cutting off the blood flow to her feet. No, actually—the zip-ties have already cut off all the blood to her feet. They’re just blocks of static and agony at the ends of her legs. She rolls her toes, and draws her knees up against her chest. She’s not stupid enough to try and pick at the ties while the Dread Pirate Wesley (and she’s going to have such a hard time watching _The Princess Bride_ after this; that, more than anything, makes her loathe Wesley more in this moment than she’s ever hated anyone in her life) is standing right there, probably with a gun, ready to stop her. If he turns his back, she could maybe get her fingers on her knife, but her hands are numb, too, so with her luck she’ll probably drop the damn thing. So not helpful.

“It’s Nobu’s,” Wesley says absently, tapping out a message on the screen. “The canvas. It’s unexpected, but the man seems to have a talent with paint.”

 _Nobu_. Memory surges. A gun trained on Elena. Someone’s cracked open her ribs and scooped out her insides. Darcy whacks her feet against the floor twice, and Wesley looks up from his tablet, eyebrows rising. “What is it?”

She shakes her head viciously, and grabs the edge of the table with her cramped hands, trying to pull herself up. She doesn’t quite manage it. The knot of fabric at the back of her head pinches at the lump on her skull. Darcy raises her hands to her mouth, prodding uselessly at the strip of fabric, and Wesley gets it. To her utter astonishment, he sets his tablet on the table, and bends to undo the gag. Before it slips free, though, he fists his hand into the hair at the back of her head, and jerks back hard. Tears rush to her eyes.

“You’re going to be a good girl and stay quiet,” he says, in a conversational tone. “We will have a pleasant discussion about facts, no hysterics, no screaming. Well, unless the occasion warrants. If you can’t manage that, the gag will be replaced, and I will have the gentleman I have waiting outside the doors teach you a lesson you will not enjoy. Do you understand me?”

Darcy nods. Spots spin across her vision. Wesley clenches his hand in her hair, and then releases her, peeling the gag away from her mouth, and removing the kerchief from inside. Darcy gags, and chokes. Her mouth is sticky and dry with something that tastes like oil. Wesley disposes of the rags on the counter—there are paint smears on them—and wipes his hands on his slacks as if she’s stained them. Finally, she works just enough spit up to manage to talk again. “Elena,” she says. “Elena Cardenas. She’s all right?”

“Why on earth would we kill her?” Wesley gives her an incredulous look. “Admittedly, it would have been a good point to make, but it would have given neither my employer—sorry. Old habits. It would have given neither Mr. Fisk nor myself any pleasure to do it. She’s tenacious, of course, but there are less messy ways to deal with the other tenants. Soon, she’ll be the last man standing, and you know what they say about those.”

Darcy has no idea what they say about those, but she’s pretty sure it’s not good. “I want proof.”

“The woman is alive.”

It’s Nobu. He’s wearing nothing but a muscle shirt and a pair of loose red pants, and there’s a fresh white bandage wrapped around his upper arm. Her lucky shot, she remembers. It must have just been a scrape, because he grabs his canvas and the three-legged stand and heaves them upright again without any trouble. He gives Darcy a considering look, and then tips his chin towards his chest. “You came quietly. The old woman was left unharmed.” She thinks he’ll say something like _I honor my promises_ , but instead he says, “It would have drawn too much attention to kill her right now, anyway,” and her heart seizes up inside her chest.

There’s a crease next to Wesley’s mouth, all of a sudden, as if he’s holding back a sneer. “Nobu.”

“Wesley,” says Nobu, and Jesus, you could cut the hate in the air with the tip of her finger. “Here ahead of your master?”

“Mr. Fisk has other things to attend to.” Wesley glances down at Darcy. “Besides, we had a bargain of our own.”

“We did,” says Nobu. He rolls his wrists. She hears a scuff of boot against concrete, and turns to see the second man from Elena’s apartment building, the one with the knife in his boot, take a place beside a pillar with his arms crossed over his chest. “As distasteful as it is.”

“Careful. If you say anything else, I’ll start to think you dislike me.”

Nobu makes a noise. _Tch_. “You may think what you like.”

Wesley’s phone buzzes. When he unlocks it, a smile spreads over his mouth. “And the mask is finally on the right track,” he says. “Took him long enough. If he’d waited any longer I would have started to think you were actually telling the truth about not knowing him, Miss Lewis.”

If it’s possible for your heart to leap and crash simultaneously, that’s what hers does. _Stay away from here. Stay away._ It’s such an obvious fucking trap and he’s going to walk right into it, because it’s her, and she’d do the same for him. _Goddammit, Matt, don’t be an idiot._

“Ah,” says Wesley. There’s a fourth man in the room, now, white, very military-ish. “Darcy, this is Francis. He’ll be assisting us today.”

Francis gives her a look of great distaste, and then mimics his equivalent, leaning against a pillar and just staring at the scene. Is this what they did to Claire? The tag teaming, the unspoken threats? Probably not. She remembers how Claire looked, after the Russians had finished with her. Or after Matt had finished with the Russians, more accurately. The Russians would have just started beating the shit out of her, not gone through this psychological bullshit. She closes her eyes for a moment, struggling to breathe. Then she says, “I don’t know the mask.”

A bomb goes off inside her mouth. Darcy’s head snaps to the side, and she tastes blood on her tongue. Wesley hasn’t moved. Neither have the goons. It’s Nobu who’s opening and closing his hand, as if hitting her hurt him more than it did her.

“Lie,” he says, and looks to Wesley. “You were correct, it seems.”

“Of course,” Wesley says, as if this is the natural order of the universe. Her lip stings. When she prods at the inside of her cheek, she finds a split about the length of one of her canines. _Okay, then_. So apparently Nobu’s up for some Russian-style interrogation too. Air snags in her lungs.

“I’m _not lying_ ,” she says again. “I don’t know who he _is_.”

This time the fist catches her eye. Her glasses jam into her face. She feels plastic pop against her temple. Darcy falls sideways, and she can’t get her hands up in time to stop herself from crashing into the concrete.

“Another lie,” says Wesley. He takes off his glasses and cleans off the lenses on his dress shirt. “The fewer lies you tell, the less he’ll hit you. It’s quite simple, really.”

Darcy spits out blood, and gags again. Then she bares her teeth. “Bite me.”

Wesley rolls his eyes up to the ceiling. “How did I know you would say that?”

“Fuck your mother, dickbag.”

Nobu says something in Japanese that makes Wesley actually scowl.

“What he said,” Darcy says, and then curls up to protect her stomach. There’s no blow, no pain, but she still feels safer that way. Nobu’s mouth twitches.

“She does not like you very much,” he tells Wesley. Wesley rolls his eyes again, and returns to his tablet.

“Stellar observation. I thought you said you’d only need one man to collect her. What happened to him?”

“He was me,” says Nobu.

“And your babysitter?”

Nobu bares his teeth. “Remind me why Fisk keeps you alive.”

“I’m very good at wine,” says Wesley, and smiles.

A hand knots up in the back of her shirt. Darcy lets out a noise that’s more animal than human, and lashes out with both feet, but someone—the man from Elena’s hallway, the one she pinched—catches her by the ankles before she can land a blow. They drop her in a chair, and she lands hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs. Before she can lunge away, the man with the knife shoves her shoulders back against the chair, and holds her there.

“So,” says Wesley, as Darcy screams, and Francis fiddles with a thing of duct tape. “It’s clear to me that you know the identity of the man in the mask. It’s also clear that he’ll be coming for you, and quite probably that moment will be soon. Which means—”

Francis hits her in the guts, and Darcy heaves. The world buzzes in her ears for a moment, an out-of-tune radio. When things clear, Wesley’s still talking. “—preferable for you if you simply answer. Of course, I don’t expect you to, at first. Which is why Nobu is here. He has a bit of a grudge against you, you see.”

“I can speak for myself,” Nobu snaps, and then says something in Japanese to the heavy-set man. She thinks it’s Japanese, anyway. The tone of the vowels seems different than the stuff Yoko and Kate say. The heavy-set man makes a face, but nods once, and leaves the room without a second glance. As soon as she’s taped up, Francis claps dust off his hands and follows him, tugging a box of cigarettes from his pocket. They’ve left her ungagged.

“Probably the best way to get me to talk is to pay off my student loans,” Darcy says, her voice high and creaky and fast. “Actually, y’know, that’s a huge untapped resource in bribery, there are loads of college graduates that would probably kill for you if you did that, and I’m not even talking grad school, you could make a mint and get so many people on your side, seriously—”

Nobu fists a hand in her hair, and _yanks_. Darcy has to bite her tongue to keep from screaming.

“She’s lying,” Nobu says.

“Believe it or not, I’d gathered that.”

“Guess I forgot to tell you I babble when people are going to torture me,” Darcy says, and shuts her eyes. “I sing, too, it really bothers people. And quote things. And—”

Nobu twists her hair tighter into his fist, and she breaks off with a whine. He leans forward. His breath smells like mint, like he’s been chewing gum. “Listen,” he says, in a quiet, careful voice. “I do not care who your man in the mask is. I know who trained him. I know his tricks. Before the night is over, he will be dead. His identity is meaningless. I take no orders from James Wesley.” He lets her hair slip through his fingers, and it lands heavy against her back. Her scalp is screaming. Nobu drops his hands to her wrists, lifting the index finger of her left hand. Darcy hiccups. There are tears on her cheeks, and she can’t remember starting to cry. “Tell me what you have found out about the Black Sky.”

She blinks at him. “What?”

The first thing she feels isn’t pain, but disconnect. Nobu yanks her finger forward and to the side, and with a _pop_ , it dislocates. Then it breaks. It takes a whole second for her nerves to register the difference, and then acid swarms up her arm. She screams, and tries to wrench her hands away, but Nobu’s already seized her by the zip-tie. She can’t pull back.

“The Black Sky,” he says again, and she shakes her head.

“ _I don’t know what that is_.”

He cocks his head, like he’s listening, and— _why_? But he doesn’t break another finger. “I believe you,” he tells her, and she bites her tongue to keep herself from sobbing. “I do.”

She hears a funny, electronic ding. When she looks over, Wesley is playing a game on his tablet.

Nobu breaks her middle finger, and she bites her lip hard enough to split.

“What have you told your friends?” he says, and Darcy’s heart leaps up into her throat. _Kate_ , she thinks. _Kate. Yoko. Karen. Foggy._ “I doubt that you have not shared your research with your coworkers.”

He lets her hands rest on her knees. Darcy chokes back bile. “You have no idea what I know,” she says. “Do you?”

It’s as if she’s hit a switch. Nobu jerks, like she’s struck him. His eyes are like coals, heat and flame and fury. This time when he grabs her by the wrists, there’s a knife in his free hand. Darcy turns her face away, panting, as he slams her left hand, the one with the broken fingers, down onto the arm of the chair. He holds it still, and pricks the back of it with the very tip of his knife. Her own blade, her flick-knife, is damp and heavy in the cup of her bra.

“You will answer me,” he says, in a low, fierce voice. Her thoughts scatter, and then collect again. “I will hear if you are lying.”

 _Heartbeats_ , Matt had said. _I know who taught him_. Stick. Blind Stick, Stick who shares Matt’s powers, not through radiation but through training, intense training, years of it. _Stick and Nobu are the same_. Darcy swallows once, twice. She’s going to throw up. Her mouth hurts. Her hand is a wasp’s nest of pain. If she lies, if she tells him _one single lie_ , he’ll know. He’ll hear it, or smell it, or—or whatever the fuck his version of polygraphing is. He’ll _know_. But if she doesn’t say something she’s going to burst. Or he’ll kill her. Or—or she doesn’t know. But if she doesn’t say _something—_

“The dissenter’s hope,” she says, in a shaking voice, “is that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.”

Nobu grits his teeth, and drives the knife down. She’s not sure if she’s screaming or not. Her mouth is open, and she feels like she should be, but she’s so struck by the sight of the knife through the back of her hand, down to the hilt, the blade emerging from the underside of the chair, that the world has gone silent. He releases the hilt of the knife, and leaves it there, in her hand, like some kind of fucked-up nail. _Jesus on the cross_ , she thinks, and starts to laugh. She can just barely hear it, on the edge of the buzz.

“Ruth Bader Ginsberg,” says Wesley, from very far away. He frowns at her. “Interesting choice.”

Nobu snaps at him, but she can’t make out the words. There’s blood running down her wrist. Her whole arm is screaming.

“You—you gain s-strength,” she says, her voice cracking, hysterical, “c-courage, and—and confidence by every experience where you—you really stop to look fear in the face.”

“Shut _up_ ,” Nobu snaps, and yanks the dagger back out of her hand. This time she hears herself shriek, and she tugs her hands tight against her chest, as if by holding them close, she can ease the pain. It doesn’t work. It’s all instinctive, though. Her brain fumbles for the words.

“You—you are able to say to yourself, ‘I-I l-lived through this. I c-can take—”

Nobu grabs her wrists, and tugs them forward again.

“—the next thing that comes—”

Another finger snaps. She forgets what she’s saying.

“—along,’” Wesley finishes. “Eleanor Roosevelt.”

Darcy faints.

She’s soaking wet and hacking when she finally roars back into consciousness, her hand still bloody, her fingers swelling like boils. They’ve been throwing buckets of water in her face. Her hands have been taped to the chair, and the working bits are tingling with blood-rush. The broken ones are dangling and crooked and useless. Her tongue scrapes against her cheek every time she coughs. Wesley’s on the phone, speaking in a language she doesn’t recognize.

“You will tell me what you know,” Nobu says, his mouth tight, his eyes crackling. “Before this is over, you _will_ tell me.”

Darcy swallows. She swallows again. Lightning crackles in her brain. Then she starts to sing, in a low voice. “ _Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear, and—and he shows them, pearly white—_ ”

He curses under his breath in Japanese, and breaks her pinky.

She faints again about three minutes after he breaks her wrist. When she’s awake, she sings, mostly. Mack the Knife, at first, over and over, and then Fly Me To The Moon. Why Don’t You Do Right—the Jessica Rabbit version, not the Peggy Lee version—has him screaming in her face. It takes a bloody nose and another gash along her forearm (right near where Goodman’s men scratched her) before Wesley finally stands and says something about damaged goods and bad answers and trying again later. “We have time,” he says. “Besides, if you break her completely, you’ll never get your answers, and I feel like the masked idiot will have some things to say about it.”

Nobu blows air out through his nose before stalking off to wash his hands. She hears a door slam somewhere, and then Wesley glances at her hand. He makes a face. There’s blood staining her skirt, dripping from her hand, her arm. She really doesn’t care.

“You truly should tell him what he needs to know,” Wesley says, grabbing a cloth from the tabletop and folding it to press against the back of her hand. She’s still crying, silently now, and she doesn’t jerk away when he presses down hard enough for it to hurt. _Pressure stops bleeding,_ Claire says in her head. She’d rather not be bleeding, even if it means Wesley touching her. “He has a temper.”

“Really,” she says, her voice hoarse. She’s speaking with a bit of a lisp, thanks to her swollen tongue. “I couldn’t tell.”

“He’s an artist,” says Wesley, as if this explains everything. She wants to take a knife to his face. And to all of Nobu’s paintings. “I hear that they have issues.”

She’s starting to wonder if she’s hallucinating all of this. “I hope someone kills you,” she tells Wesley, as he considers her broken wrist. “I hope it’s long, and painful. I hope you suffer. I hope I get to watch.”

“No wonder the devil likes you,” he says, and tugs on one of her broken fingers. Her vision whites out for a moment. “You both have an extraordinarily vicious streak.”

She sniffs, and blood from her nose pours down the back of her throat.

“Why do you protect him?” He seems genuinely curious. He cocks his head like a bird does, like a carrion crow, watching her as if she holds the answer to a question he’s been asking for forever. “Is it because you know his true identity, and care for him? Or is it because you think he’s doing the right thing?”

Darcy licks her lips. Her whole chin is smeared with blood. “Why do you work for Fisk?”

He blinks. Then he laughs. “Trying to become a private investigator now, Darcy?”

“I get Nobu.” She spits blood onto his pants, and he dabs at it with the cuff of his sleeve, nose wrinkling. “Fanatic. I get the Goodmans. Greedy rapists. I get the Russians, and I get Leland Owlsley, the Wall Street sociopath—” Wesley doesn’t react; of course he wouldn’t, Owlsley was in the paper “—but I don’t get you. I don’t get Vanessa Marianna, and I don’t get you.”

Wesley’s phone chirps. He ignores it. “Mr. Fisk has a vision,” he says. “I aim to turn it into reality.”

“He’s a psychotic murderous control-freak with inferiority issues,” she says, and then flinches. He doesn’t hit her, though. When she opens her eyes, he’s still crouched by her chair, fingering the roll of duct tape. She licks her lips again. “And Vanessa—that woman has to be as crazy as he is, if she’s really in love with him.”

She refuses to think about what that means for her. She _refuses_.

“Miss Marianna is a good person,” says Wesley, in an odd voice. “She sees the truth of what we’re trying to do, and agrees with it.”

“You’re doing something _wrong_.” She tugs at the duct tape with her still-whole wrist. “You’re _killing people_. Fisk blew up half of Hell’s Kitchen to make a fucking _point_.”

“Your devil breaks backs,” Wesley tells her. “He threw a man off a rooftop and put him in the hospital. Turned him into a paraplegic. He leaves behind a trail of disasters, small ones, the kind that build up into a holocaust.”

“As a Jew,” Darcy says, “holocaust is _so_ not the right word.”

Wesley shrugs.

“What the fuck even is my life,” Darcy says, staring at the light bulb above her head. Then she looks at Wesley again, and flexes her wrist. She thinks the duct tape might be slippery, thanks to all her blood. (She’s getting a bit dizzy, now that she thinks about it.) “That’s what you really want to know, isn’t it? Not who he is, but—but why he helps me. Why I protect him.”

He shrugs again. “It doesn’t make sense,” he says. “You’re a lawyer. Defending the law, upholding it, is your profession. Associating with the sort of man who actively lays out his own form of justice is a dissonance in your character.”

“Like Fisk’s not breaking the law?”

“I’m not a lawyer.”

She swallows back more blood. “It’s not that hard,” she says. “Fisk tried to have me killed. The devil saved my life. That’s all.”

Wesley searches her face. His eyes narrow behind his glasses. Then, slowly, he stands, and collects the cloths from the tabletop again. He rolls one into a ball in one hand, and checks his phone with the other.

“Your friend is on his way,” he says, and Darcy .wonders just how long Nobu shouted at her, and how long she was unconscious. It’s too dark outside to tell. “You would have survived longer, if you’d accepted my offer. In fact—” His mouth dips and lifts, oddly. “—I think you would have made yourself quite an asset.”

“You would have had to kill me first,” Darcy says, simple and clear. It might just be the truest thing she’s ever said. Wesley sighs, as if she’s disappointed him. Then he shoves the gag back into her mouth, and ties the second cloth, the one that holds it in place, at the nape of her neck. Darcy lets him. At least if she tastes paint, she can pretend the blood isn’t there.

“Act surprised, when he gets here,” he tells her. “It’s better that way.”

She closes her eyes, and turns her face away.

.

.

.

Wesley had set up the yakuza warehouse with the typical amount of care and consideration, so when he slips down to the basement floor, he finds Mr. Fisk sitting in the chair’d he left behind, chin propped in one hand, considering the trio of computers playing back the surveillance feed. He stands beside the chair, and just behind, folding his hands behind his back. There’s still blood on his slacks. He’s going to have to stop using this suit.

“Was Nobu as angry as he seemed?” Mr. Fisk asks, in a slightly faraway voice. His attention is still focused on the video, on the image of Darcy Lewis with her head tipped close to her shoulder, digging the nails of her working fingers into her palm and then releasing, in the same rhythm as a heartbeat.

“Yes,” Nobu snaps from the doorway. Mr. Fisk stands, and turns, inclining his head to Nobu in a way that other men would have killed for. He’s wearing gloves, now, and there’s a cherry-red traditional jacket on over his muscle tank. The jacket is untied. There are smears of blood on the white fabric of the tank. “The mask and his people have a particular talent for being irritating.”

The more he talks, the more his accent slips away. Wesley’s sure that Mr. Fisk has noticed, but he doesn’t mention it. “He does have a penchant for inducing loyalty in people, which is exactly why he is so troublesome. Where do our men place him, Wesley?”

“He found our heroin addict.” Wesley checks his phone again, but there’s no new information. “I do think it would have been cleaner to just kill the Cardenas woman, follow the original plan.”

“The woman is an innocent,” Mr. Fisk says in a quiet voice. “I would have regretted her death. Besides, as it happens, we did not need to do so. She will count her blessings, and perhaps the attack will inspire her to remove herself from the tenement like nothing else has. Besides, as Nobu has already mentioned, killing Elena Cardenas would have drawn too much attention. The whole point was to lure the mask to us, and clearly, the girl worked just as well.” He considers. “However, if Mrs. Cardenas continues to be a problem, I trust you to handle the matter.”

Wesley nods.

Nobu grunts, and ties off his jacket. He looks at the feed, too, his mouth torqued to one side. “She will not keep silent for long,” he says. “She is not trained to handle extended pain. When the mask is dead, I will remove her to a more suitable location. She will tell me what she knows, and then I will dispose of her. That will be the end of it.”

“Please,” says Mr. Fisk. “She’s a loose end. I dislike loose ends.”

Nobu’s silent for a moment or two. His eyes seem to be slightly unfocused.

“What do you intend?” Mr. Fisk asks.

“When I was a boy my teachers used to cuff me for fidgeting during meditation.” Nobu stares at the wall just to the right of the computer set-up, drumming his thumb against his hip. “There are some who think that Japanese have an innate ability to quiet their minds, to be _spiritual—_ ” he spits “—but this is not the case. No one succeeds at meditation, not at first. Possibly not ever.”

 _What the fuck,_ Wesley thinks. Mr. Fisk looks startled, too. This is more than either of them have heard from Nobu about—well, about anything, really. For the first time he thinks that he, too, might have underestimated the man.

“I thought of colors instead,” Nobu continues. “They soothed, in a way that my own thoughts did not. Eventually my teachers allowed me a room to myself, and paints. I painted everything I heard.”

Wesley frowns. “Not what you saw?”

“Sight lies.” He cocks his head. “That’s the first thing we learn. Sight can betray you. What you see can be a lie. I painted the colors I heard and it was calming. And once it begun, I could meditate as I wished. The doctors told me that it was a disconnect between my senses, a defect in my brain, but it eases my mind. Seeing sound, hearing colors. It gives me an edge.”

“Synesthesia,” Mr. Fisk says, as if Nobu is a particularly interesting science experiment. “Your people seem to collect those with extraordinary talents.”

Nobu folds his hands into fists, and then releases it again, testing the flexibility of his gloves. “You speak of honor, when you say you keep your promises. I say you are weak. Honor is a lie. Morality is a lie. Guilt, regret, these are falsehoods we tell ourselves to think that we are not animals.” He tugs on his jacket. “The truest feelings are the strongest ones. Rage. Fear. Hate. Passion. The rest are irrelevant. Tradition is a construct which we recite to our children in an effort to pretend we have some sort of worth, as if the world would give a damn at the ending of our species. I follow its idiocies—” he yanks on his jacket again “—because I fear pain if I do not. You follow your own lies because it is simpler than examining your own inadequacies.”

“Is there a point to this?” Mr. Fisk says, his jaw clenching until his teeth crack. “Or are you simply trying to rouse my temper?”

“You think because you have spent time in my country, in Gao’s, that you know us, that you know how we work. You think because you pretend to honor, to decency, that you are infallible.” Nobu’s voice is a whip crack. “It is another lie. You underestimate the woman in the room upstairs, she nearly uncovers the most important part of my work. You underestimate the mask, he forces you to reveal yourself in an effort to get ahead of his investigation. It is time for you to see the world as it is, _Mr. Fisk_ , and not as you would like it to be. Correct your mistakes. I am certain that the rest of us would say the same.”

He’s gone before either of them can speak, slipping out of the room with as much effort as a breeze. Mr. Fisk’s hands are clenched and trembling. Wesley starts calculating how much it will cost to replace the computers. Then, slowly, he relaxes his hands, drawing a breath, and releasing it.

“Wesley,” he says, and Wesley snaps to attention.

“Sir?”

“Remind me later how much I hate that man,” says Mr. Fisk, and turns to watch the video feed again. Nobu is on screen, settling a mask on his face, a hood over his head. Wesley rolls his wrist once, listening to the pop of an old break, and then nods.

“Of course, Mr. Fisk.”

_If the mask doesn’t take Nobu out, I’ll do it myself._

.

.

.

It’s very quiet in the warehouse, now.

Darcy twists her good wrist over and over, watching the duct tape twist with it. She’s not sure if it was the shock bath or just a shitty job on the part of Francis the Goon, but it’s loose, and it’s getting looser every time she flexes her hand, every time she shifts her forearm. She does it as subtly as she can, because she knows for a fact that Nobu is in the next room, with his super-hearing and his heartbeat-reading and his terribleness, but she keeps tugging. Every time she does it, the tape gets looser, and she gets closer to being able to grab the end of the tape and yank it free. She’d use her teeth, but the tape on her shoulders is making things somewhat problematic. She tries to keep her left hand still, though, because if she shifts it too much, the pain roars back into her and she has to sit and cry for a little bit before she can manage to get anything done.

_Get the knife. Get Matt. Get out._

She wants to seize Matt by the scruff of the neck and shake him, wherever he is. _It’s a trap, you idiot. Stay away._ They’re going to try and kill him, and he’ll walk right into it because of her. _Idiot, idiot, idiot_. Even if she’d do the same in a heartbeat, she’s going to kill him herself when he gets here. She’s going to kill him dead, and then have Claire work her healing magic and bring him back to life, and then she’s going to kill him again, because _she’s_ the one that gets to kill him, not Fisk, not Nobu, not anyone, because she knows if she kills Matt he’ll still be alive at the end of it.

She may be slightly hysterical. Also, she might have a concussion. She’s pretty sure she has a concussion.

The tape creaks, and she feels the arm of the chair shift. It’s old, made of wood, and when she rocks it back and forth she feels the legs shifting too. She can use that, probably. Maybe. If she can get it to break. Which she’s really not all that sure how to do. Besides, she almost has the edge of her tape between her fingers.

She hears a door open somewhere, and then it shuts again.

The tape catches in her fingernail. Darcy pinches, and pulls. She can yank harder, now, move her wrist more, but she can’t turn her hand over, and so the tape stops moving a whole three inches away from where it started. _Shit_. Her eyes ache. _Shit. Shit._ Okay, new plan. She doesn’t know what the new plan is, exactly, but it sounds like a good idea.

_Get the knife. Get Matt. Get out._

She looks at the room Nobu’s in, but she can’t see him anywhere. Which is weird, because his cherry-colored uniform should make him stand out a lot. _Hello, Daddy, hello Mom,_ she thinks, returning to her futzing with the tape. _I’m your ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb._

The door opens, and it feels like she explodes. Seriously, it’s the only way she can actually describe the cacophony that her body’s turned into, terror and frustration and so much relief that it actually physically aches as Matt darts across the room, touching his fingers to her cheeks. “Hey,” he says, and his voice breaks. “Hey, breathe. You’re okay.”

Her brain says _no, I’m not._ The rest of her says, _yes, I am._ She’s torn between the two, and she chokes on the gag when she tries to swallow back hysterical sobs. Matt fumbles at the back of her head, and undoes the knot, pulling the gag free and throwing it to the side. She’s going to cry, but she needs to get the words out. “—trap, it’s a trap, they’re going to try and kill you, you have to go—”

“Hey, shh.” He finds the loose end to the duct tape, and tears through it. Her hand screams with the blood rushing back into it. “I know. It’s okay.”

“Why don’t you _listen to me_ ,” she says, and starts to cry again, groping with her free hand until she can fist it in the collar of his shirt. “You _never_ listen to me, Nobu’s _here_ , Wesley’s _here_ , they want you dead, they u-used me to get to you—” _just like I thought they would_ “—you need to _go—_ ”

His lips are pale, but he shakes his head once, firmly, and crouches. When he goes to untie her other wrist and sees the state of her hand, even under Wesley’s makeshift patch job, his jaw clenches. “We’re both leaving here,” he says, and finds the end to that tape-handcuff, too. He has to take his gloves off to scrape the end of the tape up with his fingernail, and even that makes her keen high in the back of her throat. Her wrist fucking _hurts._ “Only option.”

“ _Don’t be a fucking hero right now_.” She reaches out with her free hand, and hooks it around the back of his neck, wishing she could shake him, not caring if Nobu sees. “You need to leave. You need to _leave_. If they kill you then it’s done, it’s all done, we’ll never be able to stop Fisk, you can’t just—I’m not going to let you die just because of me—”

Matt makes a soft sound, as if she’s stabbed him. Then he unwinds the duct tape, and sticks it to the ground. Matt sets his gloveless hand against her cheek, swiping his thumb over the soft skin beneath her eye. He doesn’t say anything, he just touches her, and she leans into his palm and hates herself. Then he stands, presses his lips once to her forehead, and steps away. She whimpers, but he’s out of reach, now, and she still has tape on her shoulders. He says, “Do I have you to thank for this, or Fisk?”

Nobu drops down into the empty storage room, and she shakes her head back and forth. _No_. She’s not sure if she’s speaking aloud or not, but it doesn’t matter now. _No, no, no, no, no._ “It seems like even the man in black has a weakness, then,” Nobu says, almost thoughtful, nothing like the funnel of rage she remembers driving a knife into her hand. “It’s nice to know that all maxims hold true.”

Matt doesn’t say anything. Darcy stops listening. She wedges her good hand up under her shirt, and slips the flick-knife out from the underside of her bra, snaking around to needle the blade into the tape holding her to the chair. The wood splinters. Neither of them seem to notice.

“When you get free,” Matt says, “get out of the building. I’ll follow you.”

 _Not fucking happening_ , she thinks, but she nods. Her heart must be beating fast enough that he can’t hear the lie, because he doesn’t say anything else. She turns away to look at the tape, and in that moment, they move. It’s like watching rage in motion. That’s the only way she can describe it. She doesn’t know anything about fighting, or fucking _sideways flips_ (because that’s apparently something they can both do?) but she can see how _angry_ Matt is. It actually hurts, and it’s hurting him, too. The iron control she remembers from the alleyway when Goodman’s men attacked her, that’s not there anymore. . She fumbles the knife, and nicks her shoulder with the tip of the blade before realizing she can’t saw and watch at the same time. There’s a scream trapped between her teeth, but she doesn’t dare utter a sound.

She’s frayed through enough of the tape to pick at it with her broken fingernails and peel it off her shoulders when she hears the chain. Her vision’s jumping, and she only sees it in pieces. The blade, the chain, the blood. One of Matt’s sticks rolls to her feet, and when she bends down to slit the zip-ties around her ankles (her toes feel as though they’re on fire) she tucks it under her bad arm. She can’t breathe. Nobu’s _good_ , he wasn’t just blowing smoke, he’s _good_ , and Matt’s outclassed, and she can’t fucking _breathe._ He hits the table, and she whines. Her feet aren’t working. The table breaks, and there’s blood smeared on a map of Hell’s Kitchen.

The scream finally bursts when Nobu’s chained blade hooks into Matt’s guts. She doesn’t think. Darcy grabs the nearest thing she can find—Matt’s stick—and throws it as hard as she can.

It doesn’t work. Why would it work? She doesn’t know how to throw a fucking baton. Still, it startles Nobu just enough that Matt heaves himself up, and kicks Nobu in the chest. There’s a crash, a clang, and then the sharp smell of gasoline. Then something shatters, and Nobu’s nothing but flames. The baton has vanished under the gasoline canisters. It doesn’t matter, though. Darcy seizes her knife and scrambles across the floor, half-walking, half-crawling, and skids to a stop by Matt. “No,” she says, “no, no no no, no, don’t you dare. Don’t you _fucking_ dare.”

Matt knocks his head against the blood smeared concrete. “Ow.”

One cut below each of his collarbones. One across the muscles in each of his arms. She doesn’t know how close the blade came to severing tendons, and oh _, god,_ she never wants to know. She peels his gloves back from the cut beneath his ribs, and then presses his hand down again to cover it. The blood’s dark, not crimson, and it’s seeping instead of spurting. No arteries torn. She hopes. It feels like lightning is lancing up her legs. “Okay.” Her voice is vibrating. “Okay. Um. We have to go. We have to _go_.”

“That would be rude,” says Wesley, and her heart stops. Of course they’re there. Wesley, and Francis of the shitty duct-tape job (screw the water, she’ll take ineptitude for $500) and—

Fisk.

Dark eyes, wide shoulders, heavy fists.

Fisk.

She digs her nails into the pale skin of Matt’s wrist, because for the first time in her life, she can’t think of a single word to say.

Fisk glances at the broken table, at the blood on the floor, and then says, “You know, it’s a pity you had to kill Nobu. I’m beginning to realize I may have severely misjudged him.”

“Wouldn’t have mattered,” Matt says, and heaves himself up off the ground. He can barely stand. Darcy follows him, or tries to, but her toes are still so numb she can only manage some kind of bent half-crouch, one knee on the ground. _Holy shit._ She can’t breathe. _Holy shit. It’s Fisk._ “You wouldn’t have lived long enough to get to know him very well.”

“Was that a death threat?” Fisk’s eyebrows lift. Wesley orbits him like a planet around a sun. She’s starting to understand why; there’s something magnetic about his voice, about the way he holds himself. Like Rich Goodman, she thinks. But where Rich is poisoned honey, Fisk is—Fisk is the dark of a moon in eclipse. “I was starting to think you didn’t make those. Then, of course, Mr. Nobu discovered this was not the case.”

He gestures to Nobu’s body, and for the first time Darcy realizes she can smell burning meat. Toasted hair and burning meat and scorched cloth, and oh, god. She gags again.

“That was before.” Matt’s voice is dark. She’s never heard him so angry. Not _ever_. “You had an innocent tortured. To—to what. To get my _attention_?”

Wesley glances at Matt, and then at Fisk. He shrugs. A gun gleams grey in his right hand. “Well. It worked, didn’t it?”

Matt takes a step. Blood spatters the floor, and his boot skids against it. Darcy grits her teeth and staggers to her feet. The soles of her feet are buzzing like fireworks. She still has her knife, folded and hidden in her palm. Nobody notices when she snaps it open. “She has _nothing_ to do with this.”

“On the contrary.” Fisk doesn’t look at her. It feels as though there’s a Gordian knot in the room, winding tighter and tighter. She can’t breathe for the fear of it. “Your friend seems to have everything to do with this. And—to be fair, Nobu was the one who hurt her so badly. I didn’t agree with his methods, but there we are.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Matt says, and oh, god, up come the guns, Francis and Wesley both. She wraps her fingers tight around the stick. It only takes a gesture from Fisk to have the pistols lowered again, for Wesley to back off.

“No,” she says, but even though she sees Matt’s shoulders twitch, Fisk doesn’t even blink.  

“You choose to die, then,” says Fisk, and holds up his fists.

Darcy takes careful aim, and throws.

Her aim’s true, this time. It hits Fisk right in the center of his broad chest, and then hits the ground with a clatter. She’s torn his suit. Fisk flinches back with a growl that has Francis’s gun back up and Wesley darting forward to check on his master. At the same moment, Matt loses his balance, and Darcy lunges past him, throwing her arms wide. She hears someone shouting, but she’s not sure who it is, Matt or Fisk. The gun goes off once, but there’s no pain, no reverb of a hit. There’s just a scorch on the concrete, a foot to her right. Fisk’s ham-like hand is clenched hard around Francis’s forearm, forcing his gun to the side.

Behind her, she hears Matt moan, low in his throat.

“No,” she says again, and pulls her broken wrist in to her chest. There’s a strange calm spreading through her, the stillness in the air before a storm. She swallows hard. “Don’t hurt him, don’t. I’ll—you can kill me, okay? I’m the one who knows about Nobu and you and the Goodmans, I’m the one that can talk, _I’m_ the problem, not him. Leave him _alone_.”

Wesley goes to raise his gun, but Fisk shakes his head once. His hand goes up to his sternum, massaging the spot where the knife had landed. There’s no mark. There’s not even blood. _Is he invulnerable now_? “You’re the lawyer woman,” says Fisk, and frowns. “I must apologize. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”

She laughs. Panic and terror and fury and hate have all melded, and all she can do is laugh. “Ask your butler. I’m sure he can tell you.”

Fisk angles his eyes at Wesley, and then shakes his head once. “Lewis,” he says, as if he’s pulled a rabbit out of a hat. “Darcy Lewis.”

Blood drips from her fingers and onto the concrete. Her socks are soaked with it. “Four for you, Glen Coco.”

“Darcy,” Matt says behind her, but he can’t quite get to his feet again now that he’s fallen down. She doesn’t look at him. If she looks at him, she’ll break.

“You can kill me,” she says again, her voice steady. “Look at him. You think he can hurt you anymore?”

“He has a tendency to crop up again at the most inconvenient times,” Wesley says, and she touches the makeshift bandage on the back of her broken hand and stares at him. “It would be simpler to cut them both down now.”

“No.” Fisk shakes his head again, and takes one step forward. She’s pretty sure she imagines the way the floor trembles under his feet. “You’d die for this man in the mask?”

She jerks her chin up. “Did I fucking stutter?”

His forehead creases. Her knife has skidded off somewhere under the broken table. Fisk takes another step forward, and Darcy retreats until she feels the heels of her feet clip Matt’s hip. At least, she thinks it’s his hip. She can’t really feel any part of her feet right now. “Why?” Fisk asks, and she’s really done with bad guys questioning her motives, okay? _She’s_ not the one with questionable motives here. She shakes her head.

“Not your business.”

His eyebrows snap together. “Humor me, Miss Lewis.”

Matt clutches a hand around her ankle, and traces a letter against her buzzing skin. _W_. W what? W Wesley? Then he sketches out an _I_ , and then an _N_. Darcy clears her throat. “Why do you want to know?”

“You don’t have to answer that, sir,” says Wesley instantly, giving her a look that says _I will kill you with my bare hands_ , but Fisk makes one last gesture, and he falls quiet again.

“She’s about to die, Wesley. I see no point in not answering such a simple question during her last moments.” _D_ , Matt writes, _O_ , and suddenly it clicks. _Window_. She shifts her foot, and he lets go. “You remind me of someone, Miss Lewis,” Fisk says, and draws a handkerchief from his pocket, wiping the sweat from his wide forehead. “Perhaps through understanding you, I will begin to understand her a little better.”

 _Vanessa Marianna_. She licks her lips. “I’m not here to be your counselor.”

“Sir,” Wesley says again.

“Answer my question, Miss Lewis,” says Fisk. She hears Matt scrape against the concrete, and then he falls still again. Darcy takes a step back, and nearly falls. She looks over her shoulder, and Matt’s hand is knotted into a fist against the hole in his guts, there’s blood soaking his shirt, smeared over his chin, and oh, _god_. “Do you feel you owe him, for saving you from Goodman’s men? That seems a bit—forgive me, but it seems too altruistic, even for a down-and-out lawyer.”

Matt taps her ankle with three fingers. Then with two.

“Sorry,” she says. “Guess you’re not getting your answers.”

Fisk’s mouth contorts. He bares his teeth, and Wesley raises his gun. Before he can fire, something flies past her cheek. With a sputtering hiss, the last lightbulb goes out. An arm cinches tight around her waist, and then they’re out and falling, glass scraping at her cheeks, knifing down deep into the frigid Hudson River.

.

.

.

Getting back to Matt’s apartment is possibly the worst thing she’s ever had to do in her life.

Darcy peels off her long-sleeved shirt, and has Matt hold it tight to his stomach as they creep through the shadows, from alley to alley to alley until they all start to blend in her head. Maybe they’ve stumbled into a pocket universe, into a _Groundhog Day_ of New York streets. She doesn’t recognize anything, not at this time of night, not slinking through the dark. Aside from clipped directions—“ _turn here, someone’s coming, there, that way_ ”—Matt doesn’t say a word. Darcy whispers to him as they move, keeping his arm tight around her shoulders in some kind of messed-up three-legged-race where one of them’s useless and the other’s bleeding out. Later, she can’t even remember what she told him. Stories about Eli, she thinks. Things about her mom, the stuff she’s never really mentioned to either Matt or Foggy before. Stuff about Jen, maybe, the sort of thing Jen would kill her for spilling if not for the fact that Matt would never, ever tell anyone. Also that Matt may be dying.

( _He’s not dying, he’s not, he’s not, he’s just not—_ )

They go in through the fire escape. She has to break the window in Matt’s bedroom with her elbow, fumble the lock open, and then help him through. There are broken bits of plastic and wood on the floor of the living room, shattered bottles and the coffee table in pieces between the couch and the armchair. She doesn’t ask. Darcy squeezes his elbow with her good hand. “Matt, I need you to sit. Okay? I’m gonna get the first aid kit and—and I don’t know. Um.” He doesn’t seem to hear her. She plucks at the edge of his sleeve, ignoring the way she’s shivering. It comes in bursts, stronger, weaker, but the tremors never stop. “Matt?”

“Someone’s coming,” he says, and then he topples. He hits the floor with a crash that shakes her down to her marrow, and Darcy nearly gets yanked off her feet.

“ _Matt_.” She falls to her knees, pushes him onto his back. He’s still breathing, but when she takes his mask off, his eyes are closed. She touches her fingertips to the pulse in his throat. His heartbeat seems very fast, considering how much blood he’s lost. “Matt, honey, can you hear me?”

Matt makes a noise deep in his chest, and his head lolls towards her. He licks his lips. “You’re loud.”

“I need you to stay awake, okay? Just—I’m gonna call Claire.” Who’s in Albany, too far away to do anything about any of this. _Goddammit._ If she’d waited _two more days_. “I’m gonna call Claire.”

“Foggy,” says Matt, and for a second she thinks the blood loss has finally hit him in the face. Then there’s another loud bang on the door, and she hears someone shouting.

“Shit.” Darcy pats his cheek, and then the uninjured part of his chest, because she doesn’t know what else to do. Out in the hallway, she hears Foggy say something like “ _if you have a paralegal in there and you’re not answering me I’m gonna be very mad, Matt_!” “Shit. Um. Matt, I need to let him in.”

He fumbles for her wrist, and misses. “Darcy—”

“I can’t do this on my own, Matt, I can’t, not with only one hand. I can’t—” She touches his cheek. His eyes are only just barely open. “I’ll be right back, okay? I’ll be right back.”

He mouths her name, and then his eyes close all the way, and she has to lay her good hand flat against his chest to make sure he’s still breathing. She can hear footsteps on the roof access stairs, through Matt’s stupidly thin walls. She heaves herself to her feet (her hand’s bleeding again, and there’s river water running down her back from her hair) and heads to the bathroom, grabbing Matt’s cell phone (“four missed calls from Karen,” Sadie the Speaker Lady tells her, “five missed calls from Foggy,”) and dials Claire’s number.

The roof door opens. Foggy peeks through. His eyes widen. Then he’s flying down the stairs, and Darcy lets him crash into her, even though he ends up stepping into the hole in the floor, because this is Foggy, this is _Foggy_ , and he’s babbling nonsense in her ear. He might actually be crying. She hooks one arm tight around him and goes up on tiptoe to hide her face in his neck, and she just breathes for a second or two, because if Foggy’s here, things are going to be okay. It’s been true for seven years, and nothing will change that.

“ _Where the hell have you been_ , Elena said some guys grabbed you and you’ve been gone all day and holy shit, that’s blood, you’re covered in blood, what the fuck are you doing here, Darcy, oh my _god—_ ”

“Foggy.” She pulls back. “Foggy, listen to me. _Listen_ to me. I need you to help me with something, okay? And I need you to not—not freak out, not right away, you’re allowed to freak out when it’s done, but I need you to _promise me_ you will not panic, because that is—that is the last thing that needs to happen right now.”

“What—”

“I love you, okay?” she says, and digs her fingernails into the back of his neck. “I need you to remember that. You’re my best friend, you’re like my brother, and I really, really need you to trust me. And you are _not allowed to freak out_.”

“Darcy, you’re scaring me.”

 _Yeah, and it’s gonna get worse._ “Don’t hate me,” she says, and even though she’s cried herself dry in the past few hours, she can still feel heat pricking at the backs of her eyes. “Please don’t hate me, okay? Don’t hate either of us, but I need you to—I need you to help me get him on the couch.”

“Get who on the—”

He stops. She sees the moment when it clicks, when he sees the body on the floor of Matt’s bedroom, when he looks at her wrist and the blood and the discarded mask on the floor. He goes white, and then red, and then white again, and this time when he turns to look at her, his mouth is set in a hard, thin line.

“Okay,” he says, and with that, just that, nothing is ever going to be the same again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I seriously don't know what Wesley is even doing anymore. 
> 
> ALSO BEFORE I FORGET: sarcastissa drew a BEAUTIFUL SKETCH of Kitty!Matt being sad. You should all go love on sarcastissa, because it's amazing and is now my phone background. 
> 
> HIS SAD FACE AND KITTY EARS AND AH.
> 
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz73qrQ2L-PgbDEwRWFyYUN4Smc/view?usp=sharing


	13. Dark and Dawn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of you may once again have noticed that I have boosted the chapter count. Again. Because apparently "Nelson v. Murdock," "The Path of the Righteous," and "The Ones Left Behind" are all quite probably gonna be two-parters. (I'm between one-third and halfway through "The Ones Left Behind" and still have a lot to get through because APPARENTLY I CAN'T SHUT UP.) 
> 
> Foggy is Not Happy in this chapter. Also, Father P rules the world. These crazy kids. 
> 
> Mild trigger warning for: Injury references, Intense Feels.

Foggy throws up three times, and nearly faints twice, but he doesn’t freak out, which is probably the only highlight of her night.

Her wrist and fingers are something neither of them are anywhere near equipped to deal with. Claire reams her out when Darcy finally mentions it (only after Matt’s stitched up; Darcy never wants Claire to lecture her again) and then she calls a friend of hers who moonlights as a slum doctor on the other end of the city. They meet up with her at a veterinary hospital three blocks from the _Bulletin_ , in a run-down old tenement building that makes her skin crawl. It feels too much like Elena’s building, and the druggie with the knife is lurking in the edge of her vision, lashing out, Nobu on his heels.

CC—it’s the only name the woman gives, and she does it with a look of such deep suspicion that Foggy starts to puff up and get offended—x-rays her arm, declares that her wrist has a closed transverse fracture of both the ulna and radial bones, and pops her index finger back into place with a crack (Foggy has to go throw up again) before setting the damn thing and casting it up. It’s a very awkward cast, too, because of her hand and the big-ass hole in the center. (All tendons still working, apparently. A night of miracles. CC stitches it closed on both sides, wraps it in gauze, and then jury-rigs a cast for her arm that ends just in the center of her palm, so that the gauze can be changed without too much trouble.) “You’re lucky you don’t need surgery,” CC tells her, seriously. “And if Claire hadn’t been the one to refer you to me, I would have told you to call the police. You probably still should.”

“Can’t,” Darcy says, “but thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.”

CC grunts, and jabs her with a tetanus shot. Being systematically stabbed in an old, asbestos-filled warehouse and then floating in the Hudson River for who knows how long with open wounds is not a good combo. “You said you had another friend who was hurt?”

“Yeah. I stitched him up, but—um. I’m not really a nurse. Claire coached me through it.”

CC sighs deeply, and closes her battered medical kit. “Show me.”

She pronounces Matt decent enough for the moment (Matt rouses the moment she steps over the threshold, a fit of terror and paranoia having him halfway off the couch and onto his feet before Darcy can get her hands on him and push him back down) and gives him a multitude of injections that look more painful than the actual stitch job. She draws Darcy aside on her way out. “He gets feverish, starts hallucinating, sweating, gets weird at all, you call me. Same goes for you. Claire will text you my number. I don’t know what you two are doing, but it seems like it’s not the first time this has happened.”

“Probably won’t be the last,” says Darcy with a shaky smile.

She huffs. “You.” Foggy jumps, and snaps to attention. “She has a concussion. Keep an eye on her.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

CC studies them both carefully, hooking her long braids back out of her face. Then she squeezes Darcy’s shoulder, tugs her hood back up over her head, and leaves. Darcy closes the door very quietly behind CC, resting her forehead against it for a moment. The clock on the wall reads 3:17.

“Do I get an explanation now?” Foggy says, his voice wound tight. “Since it seems like I’m the last one to know. Again.”

“He didn’t tell me,” Darcy says. She sounds like hell, like she’s spent hours screaming. _Oh, wait._ “I figured it out by accident a few days ago.”

She’s not sure if that makes him relax, or get even tenser. “So I’m the last to know by about forty-eight hours. Awesome. Still means you didn’t tell me.”

“Not my secret to tell,” she says, tiredly, and looks at her fingers. They’re puffy and purple and highly uncomfortable, and she can already tell that her cast is going to itch terribly. The cut from Nobu on her left arm mirrors the gash from Robbie Goodman’s goon almost exactly.

“That’s why you were arguing,” Foggy says. He drops down onto the edge of the nearest chair, perching like he’s ready to bolt. She nods once. She’s finally stopped shaking (she’s pretty sure CC’s boosted pain meds had something to do with that) but she feels like she should be throwing up. She hasn’t done it yet, and she wants the Hudson River _out of her_.

“That’s why we were arguing. Among other reasons.”

“I thought he’d finally asked you out and you weren’t taking it well,” says Foggy. Darcy nearly drops the beer she’s snitching out of Matt’s fridge, because, um, excuse me, _what_? “This is—um. Not…exactly what I expected.”

“How angry are you with me right now?” she asks, and closes her eyes, keeping her back carefully turned. Foggy lets out a gusty sigh.

“Pretty fucking angry. But I also just heard the intimate details of how you were apparently _tortured_ , so I don’t think I could yell at you if I tried.” The weight of the pause is something that could crush her, if she lets it. “You haven’t, like, started vigilante-ing yourself, have you? Because, yeah. If _both_ of you are running around dressed up in masks and—and Jesus, the bombings, all of that, that wasn’t—”

He stops.

“Do you really think Matt would blow up a building?” She’s _so_ tired. Her voice slurs a little. “Or—or shoot cops? Do you really think he’d do that, Foggy?”

Foggy’s quiet for a moment. He clears his throat. “The Matt we knew wouldn’t,” he says, but the rest of it, _the mask might_ , that’s clear enough in his silence. She shakes her head.

“He didn’t do any of that.” She grabs a beer for Foggy, too, tucking the first under her arm, and nudges the fridge shut with her hip. “If he had, I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t still be in the firm. I wouldn’t have—”

_Don’t hurt him, don’t. I’ll—you can kill me, okay? Leave him alone._

“Okay.” Foggy’s voice cracks. “Okay.”

She wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand, pressing the chill glass of the beer against her bruises. “Elena’s really okay?”

“Elena’s okay. She’s staying with Karen and Jen—oh my god. They don’t know you’re alive yet, do they? We need to call them, Jen had like four panic attacks over the course of an hour, and Brett is still out looking for you, actually, so yeah, we’re calling her _right now—_ ”

“You can’t tell her about Matt,” Darcy blurts, and Foggy gives her such a look that she wants to curl into a ball and hide in the deepest, darkest hole she can find. “It wasn’t my secret to tell you, Fog, it’s not your secret to tell her. I know you like her a lot, and I love Karen, but—but this is Matt’s thing. Okay? We just—I can’t. Please don’t. Please.”

“Darcy.”

“Foggy.” She puts the beers down. “Foggy, _please._ Please. I’m not saying—I’m not saying never tell them, I’m just—it’s his secret, okay?”

“That’s not the _point_.” Foggy throws his cell phone onto the makeshift coffee table, which is actually an old carton she found in one of the closets. “The point is you’re asking me to lie to Karen. Darcy, you’re asking me to lie to _your cousin_. Because of—of this vigilante _bullshit_. And apparently I _can_ yell at you, because you’re defending Matt’s fuck-ups _again_ , just like you always do, I don’t think you even realize you’re doing it half the time, and it scares me a little because apparently you’re willing to defend him _hurting people now_!”

“I’m not defending that.” She can’t keep her voice from hitching. “I don’t—what he does, he—the mask _saved my life._ Tonight, and when the Goodmans had me attacked, he _saved_ me, okay? He saved _Karen_ , he _protects_ people when he does this, Foggy. It’s not just—it’s not like he’s doing this just so he can—so he can pound on people for no reason _._ ”

“You’re doing it again!” He shoots to his feet. Somehow, in spite of everything, he’s careful to keep his voice low enough to not wake Matt. _Oh, Foggy._ “You’re defending this. _Why are you defending this_?”

“ _Will you listen to me?_ I’m not defending it! Do you think I’d let him hurt anyone, if that was what he was doing? Is that what you think—” _of me?_ She chokes the words down. “There’s a part of me, too, that wants to—that wants to punish people like Fisk or Goodman or W-Wesley for hurting others, _that’s in me too_ , Foggy, I can’t judge him for that! And I won’t speak for him, it’s his own job to explain to you why he does what he does, so _stop asking me_!”

They stare at each other. Her fractured rib aches. Finally, Foggy pinches the bridge of his nose, and lets out a low string of swearwords under his breath. He cracks his beer, and drinks half of it in one go. “I’m yelling at a torture victim,” he says. “I’m an asshole.”

“I lied to you about our vigilante best friend,” she says. “I’m an asshole, too.”

He snorts, and swirls his beer in the bottle. “Don’t ask me to lie to Jen and Karen, Darce.” (She’s pretty sure he’s not even aware of using that nickname, but it makes something that feels a little like hope bubble up her throat and into tears.) “I won’t do it. It’s not fair to them and it’s not fair to me for you to ask it of me.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that. Darcy drops down onto the floor, leaning her back against the couch. She can hear Matt breathing from here, if she listens hard enough. She points at her face, at her swollen cheek. “This was for me lying and saying I didn’t know who the mask was,” she says. She touches the bandage over her eyebrow. “This is for lying again when they realized I wasn’t telling them the truth.”

He turns slightly green.

“This is dangerous, okay? The—the more they know, the more vulnerable they get. Do you think I want to lie to them? Jen isn’t—Jen is my _sister_ , Foggy, she’s my sister in all the ways that matter, and I will _die_ before men like Fisk get their hands on her. Do you hear me? I will _kill him_ before he touches Jen. And the same with Karen. She’s been hurt by Fisk before, I don’t want—I don’t want her on his radar for this, too. At least not yet. We’re all in so much danger already, and if—if you add this to it tonight, Foggy, they could both be killed, and we wouldn’t be able to stop it.”

Foggy goes white around the mouth, and shuts his eyes tight. His throat works.

“I’m not saying never tell them. I’m saying that—that we have to wait. Just for a little while, until things are a bit calmer.” She holds her hand out. “I’ll do it. I can lie better than you, anyway.”

“I don’t know if I hate you or not right now,” Foggy says, and snatches the phone before she can. “No. If—if you call them, they’ll freak out. Um. I’ll call, and let them know you’re okay. And I’ll call Brett. Just—just don’t make me regret this, Darcy.”

She watches him walk away, and rests her head against the arm of the couch, watching Matt breathe under his blanket.

Foggy makes the call. She can hear his voice through the wall of the bedroom, hear him telling Jen to stop crying, hear him talking with Karen on and off, the clumsy Spanish with Elena. Foggy cares _so much_ , she thinks, her heart triple its regular size and aching. He cares so much about everyone, and if he cares about someone it’s—she doesn’t know how to describe it. Foggy picks people, and when he picks people, he _picks_ people. They’re _his people_. He’s like her that way. He knows everyone, he’s nice to everyone, but there are just a few that he chooses, and it takes a hell of a lot to make him regret his choice. She hopes this isn’t that final straw, because she doesn’t know what she’d do without Foggy. Thinking about it makes her feel like a human void, somehow. She shies away from the idea. She’s had too much void in her life tonight to handle that line of thought right now.

He calls Brett, too. That call’s much quieter—there’s a lot of “tomorrow” and “later, okay?” and “she’s gonna have to tell you that herself”—but it’s still loud enough in its own way. Behind her Matt sleeps, too quietly, and Darcy turns so she can touch her fingertips to the back of his hand, to reassure herself that it’s warm, and that he’s breathing still. Foggy slinks back into the living room like a dog that’s just been kicked, his eyes red and his breathing unsteady. She doesn’t smile.

“Thank you,” she says, and it’s so completely inept, but it’s the only thing she can say. He laughs, low and hoarse.

“You owe me for that one, Lewis. That was possibly the worst half an hour of my life.” He looks at her cast. “Which probably doesn’t compare to how your night is going.”

“Yeah, well.” She closes her eyes, leaning her head against the couch again. “It’s a work in progress.”

“What do you need?” asks Foggy seriously, and yeah, okay. That hurts. She swallows twice, and looks at him through a blur of tears.

“I—I need to tell you something that happened to me when I was a kid. And—and maybe it’ll make you hate me, but I don’t—” there’s her Atlanta voice coming back, low and drawling and sad. “—I d-don’t want to lie to you anymore. And, um. That’s the only thing I’ve never really told you about.”

Foggy watches her for a long time. Then he stands, and collects the two beers she’s left on the crate. “Come on,” he says. “I think you’re about to pass out, and I have it on good authority that Matt’s bed is super comfortable. Probably especially so for—” he trips over his tongue “—for torture victims.”

“It is,” she says without thinking. “The bed, I mean.”

Foggy wrinkles his nose. “I’m trying really hardnot to follow that statement down to its conclusion because it will scar me for life. But it’s _very difficult._ ”

“I’ve slept in your bed too, y’know,” she says, and reaches out to touch him. Then she hesitates, and pulls back. “It’s not—it wasn’t like that.”

“Well, good, because as much as it seems like you guys like to lie to me, I really would think that I’d be the first to know if you two were doing the nasty. Best friend status and everything.”

Darcy shakes her head. “You’re not—you’re my brother. I told you that earlier. You’re like—I don’t even know. It’s the closest word to it that I can think of, but that’s what you are. Okay? And I know—no matter how furious you are with me, that’s—that’s something I want you to know.”

“You’re not allowed to say stuff like that when I’m mad at you,” Foggy tells her, his voice suspiciously damp. “It’s unfair and makes me weepy.”

“Well, it’s true,” she says, and sniffs, loudly. “So—so yeah.”

(She steals Matt’s Topeka shirt. She’s fucking earned it.)

.

.

.

Foggy does not take the story about Eli well. He paces, and flings his hands, and snarls at walls, and is generally furious, but surprisingly, he’s not angry with her. Or if he is, he’s hiding it very well, considering how well she knows him. She starts crying halfway through his tirade against the Georgia justice system and her mother’s ineptitudes and the uselessness of Atlanta medical examiners, and he clambers up onto Matt’s bed and Darcy curls up with her face hidden in the fabric of his pants, crying until she can’t breathe.

He pets her hair until she falls asleep, and when she wakes shrieking, when her dream Mr. Bletchley turns into Wesley turns into Nobu turns into a dead Eli and a dying Matt, he lets her cling to him until the trembling stops.

“I didn’t want you to hate me,” she says, just as dawn is breaking through the window. Her whole body aches. She thinks Foggy is asleep, but he draws a sharp breath, and cards his fingers through her hair. She hides her face in his leg again, and tries to steady her lungs. “I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t say anything, but she thinks he might forgive her a little, after that. She can’t remember falling asleep, but by the time she does, he hasn’t pulled his hand away.

It all goes to shit when Matt wakes up, of course. But she has that moment.

.

.

.

Darcy wraps her arms in plastic bags and saran wrap, runs a shower, and plays loud music for the whole of their fight. It’s super cowardly, and she hates herself for doing it, but at the same time, it’s _their_ fight—she’s done what she can, and getting in the way of it will make things worse. (“I thought I knew who you were, but apparently I don’t know a damn thing!” “Foggy—”) She knows that already. Matt and Foggy have never fought before, and throwing herself in the middle (“—what I don’t get is why you dragged Darcy into it—” “—I didn’t drag her into this anymore than I dragged myself—”) won’t help at all. She ignores the rumble of voices through the wall, blasting Spinal Tap and shouting along every time they get too loud. (“ _You’re taking advantage of her!”_ “She makes her own decisions, Foggy—” “Yeah, well, when it comes to you I’m never really sure about that—”)

She turns up the sound on the laptop after that, and wishes she could stick her fingers in her ears.

It’s only when there’s been quiet out in the living room for a good twenty minutes that she heaves herself out of the now-cold bath, rubs her hair mostly dry with a towel, and puts her borrowed clothes back on. Her mouth tastes like blood and old beer, and she really wishes she had a toothbrush she could use, but whatever. She steals some mouthwash, just to get the worst of the taste out. She’s already texted Kate to let her know that Foggy will be taking Darcy’s place in the TMZ interview. Kate hasn’t texted her back beyond a clipped _k_ , but at least that won’t be completely butchered.

In the dim light through the bathroom window, it all starts to feel like a dream. Or a night terror. She looks at her hand, at the gauze and the splints and the cast, and then leans forward to peer at her face in the mirror. Her glasses are cracked on one side, the earpiece almost entirely broken. She can tape it, but it’ll only do so much for so long. It’s a miracle they stayed on for their Hudson River trip. Darcy turns, peering at her ribs (still gross, but much less so than they were, the fractured one finally steadying out) and then checks her face again. The bruises are bad, but they’re not as terrible as when Goodman’s men jumped her. Nobu had been more interested in breaking her piece by piece than just punching her over and over again.

( _—fire and the stench of gasoline and burning cloth and the pop of bone—_ )

 _Make-up_ , she thinks, and leans back. Make-up and some ginger movement. And a sling, for her arm. Also possibly sleeping meds, because she has a feeling she’s going to be waking up screaming for a long time to come.

( _—the crack of her wrist breaking, blood burbling up between Matt’s fingers—_ )

When she finally gathers herself up and forces herself to leave the bathroom, the emptiness of the living room makes her soul hurt. Matt sits on the couch, his face turned towards the blazing windows, eyes closed, his lips pressed thin. She peels the saran wrap off her bandages, and drops it in the trashcan. “Didn’t go well,” she says. It’s not a question.

“No shit,” Matt snaps, and pinches the bridge of his nose. His cheeks are damp. “How much did you hear?”

“Not as much as you.” She bites her lip. He shouldn’t be sitting up. She wants to hit him. She sees the hooked blade in his guts again, and she has to press the back of her hand to her mouth and swallow repeatedly to keep herself from puking. “You’re not taking advantage of me, y’know.”

He shifts on the couch. “You’re not going after him? Foggy.”

“No. I have to go to the 15th and give a statement in a bit.” She pulls the bag of coffee beans out of the refrigerator, and starts a hunt for the grinder. “Jen and Karen are going to come pick me up. And then—I dunno. I was thinking about hiding out at Claire’s. I need to water her plants anyway.”

Matt shakes his head, like he’s brushing away a fly. He doesn’t say anything. She fiddles with the hem of the Topeka shirt.

“You should probably lay back down,” she says. “If you tear my stitches I’m going to be very unhappy.”

He turns to face her then, his eyes wide. “You did these?”

“You don’t remember?” Matt shakes his head again, and she ladles beans into the grinder, not able to quite able to look at him any longer. “I had Claire teach me a little bit. She’s up in Albany, so it’s not like—it’s not like she could have done it. She sent me to a friend of hers to get my wrist patched up a little bit, CC, she checked it. Said I did an okay job. I dunno, though.”

Matt opens his mouth, and then shuts it again. He closes his eyes. “Oh.”

“That sounds like a bad oh.” She hits the button the grinder, holding it so that the utterly normal, utterly reassuring whir of blades on beans stifles whatever he says in reply. She buzzes it a few more times, just because she can, and then goes to boil water.

“You stitched me up before you went to get your wrist fixed?”

His voice is doing something weird again. Darcy lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “I mean, you had a gut wound. I feel like—I felt like that was slightly more important.”

“My intestines were fine,” he says, as if this were obvious to anyone. Suddenly she really wants another beer. 

“See, _I_ didn’t know that, because I don’t have super X-ray hearing.” She swallows. “Foggy helped a little. Well, he. Uh. He kept you from moving too much while I, um, checked to see if anything was torn. Really glad I don’t do it for a living, that’s all I have to say.”

She never wants to do that again. She knows she fumbled it, even if it was only a little, because Matt made a terrible sound while she’d been checking the pieces inside, like she’d been ripping him in half. She never, ever wants to hear him make a noise like that again. Not ever.

“I don’t remember getting here,” he says, all of a sudden. Darcy watches the kettle. “How did we get here?”

“Walking, mostly. Some running. Some hiding, too.” She tugs the half-and-half out of the fridge, and smells it before setting it on the counter. “I had to break one of your windows. Sorry.”

“It’s already a wreck anyway, thanks to Stick.”

Well, that answers more questions than it doesn’t. He swings his legs off the couch again, and Darcy hisses. “ _Don’t you dare._ ”

“Meditation,” he says, like this makes any sense. “Helps me heal quicker.”

“Meditation doesn’t keep your torn flesh together, stitches do that. And stitches don’t _work_ if you _tear_ them, you idiot.” She’s out of the kitchen and beside the couch before she remembers moving. Darcy sets her good hand flat against his shoulder, and pushes him back to the cushions. “Stay.”

“I’d have to try harder than this to tear them,” he says.

Her stomach churns. “Jesus, don’t tell me that. Now I’ll wonder how you _know_ that. Jesus Christ, Matt.”

“I’m talented,” he says, the corners of his mouth curling into a shapeless smile. He still sits hunched, though, as if to protect himself from a coming blow. She presses the pads of her fingers into the back of his shoulder, and then draws back. “When did you say Jen and Karen are coming?”

“At nine. So, an hour. Ish.”

“And they knows you’re here?”

“Foggy told them. Not that you’re hurt, too, so you’d better come up with a story for that. But yeah. They know I’m here.”

“And Kate?”

“Foggy’s doing the interview for me. I think he wants to distract himself, and he’ll be good. As long as he doesn’t have a panic attack on camera.”

“Hey,” Matt says, when she starts to turn away. “Can you—just.” He holds out a hand, and she looks at it for a long time before she reaches forward and takes it. Matt heaves a breath, and reaches up with his other hand to brush his fingertips over her jaw. She tips her head forward and lets him.

“Foggy’s right.” There’s a bruise on his arm that looks like a handprint. Or a fist. “About me taking advantage of you. It’s unfair of me to drag you into this.”

“There you go again with your martyr complex.” She goes to draw away, and then stops herself. His hand is cool and soothing on her bruised cheek, and if he’s going to kick her out, she’ll take advantage of this for as long as she can. “I dragged myself in, Matt. Jesus.”

She can see it when his throat works. Darcy stands, and waits. Matt swallows again, and then says: “I’m not hurting you?”

“Butterfly hands,” she replies, barely speaking, and for the first time since he woke up, his lips twitch into something closer to an honest smile. He strokes a thumb over her still-aching nose.

“Maybe, if you think about butterflies and chaos theory.”

 _A butterfly beats its wings_ , _and a hurricane destroys a small city. If the butterfly flaps its wings a millisecond later, the hurricane passes, and the city continues on unharmed._ She turns her face into his fingers, letting her lips brush against the heel of his palm. “You’re not chaos, Matt.”

His fingers tighten on hers. Matt closes his eyes, and she thinks she sees a tear on his cheek. Then he tugs her hand, ever so lightly, and Darcy comes around the couch to sit beside him, tucking her hair back behind her ears so that he can really see. He doesn’t touch her bruises again, though. He slides one hand around the back of her neck, and his thumb brushes at the hollow behind her earlobe. _A world on fire,_ she thinks. All of them made of flame, scorching each other until the planet turns to ash.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He keeps his eyes closed as he lifts his other hand, sliding his thumb over the line of her unbruised cheek. Every touch is hesitant, like he’s afraid to hurt her. Or he’s not sure he’s allowed. “That I didn’t get there fast enough.”

“Hey, no.” She reaches out, sets her fingers to his cheek, to the stubble of his jaw. “No. You came as fast as you could, even though it was a _stupid idea_. There wasn’t anything else you could have done to get there faster. I’m sure of it.”

“You don’t even know what I did,” he says, but she shakes her head. His knuckles catch in her damp hair.

“You came. That’s what matters.” She presses his hand close to her cheek, and then looks at him, full on, for what feels like the first time in days. _Yesterday he said he wanted to kiss me_ , she thinks. It feels like forever ago. “You’re not allowed to say sorry for any of it. I told you, I knew what I was doing, and I knew what the risks were. If you feel guilty for something that _I_ decided, you’re taking away my right to have made the decision in the first place. Don’t do that. We’ve talked about this.”

He rests the pad of his thumb in the dip between her nose and mouth, as if to memorize the angle of it. Then he says, “They hurt you because of me.”

“And they nearly killed you because of me, so we’re even.” She swallows. “And—and I’m sorry that I didn’t help. With Nobu. I don’t—I should have done something. More than what I did. And you—there was so much _blood—_ ”

Matt draws his fingers through her hair. “No. It’s okay. I’m okay.”

She has to close her eyes and breathe thick and fast through her nose for a minute or two before she can steady out again. Her head aches. Concussions suck some major donkey wang. “You’re not okay.”

“Neither are you.”

“I’m not the one who was dragged along the floor by a dagger in his guts.”

Matt shakes his head. “It’s not the same. I _chose_ to put myself at risk like that, you—”

“Matt, they hurt me because I stuck my nose into their business, knowing they would probably come after me. I feel like that’s the definition of a choice.”

“And I was a part of that.”

“Yeah, well. The fingers were because I didn’t know what he meant by Black Sky, and the wrist—uh. He was kind of pissed because I was singing at him. Random aside, I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to listen to Mack the Knife again.” She turns her face into his hand again, closing her eyes. “The only one who asked me who you are was Wesley, and he—he didn’t touch me. Not really.”

She feels the muscles in his palm tense. His fingernails catch behind her ear. “You told them to kill you,” Matt says, the words turning high and strange at the end. “You told them to kill you in my place.”

“Matt—”

“Don’t do that.” He leans forward, breath catching in his chest. Matt cups her face in his hands and opens his eyes again, and she’s not sure what to do other than stay absolutely still. “Don’t—please don’t do that. Don’t—don’t throw yourself away. Not for me. Please.”

“That’s a double-standard.” She shakes her head. “You were going to—I thought you were _dying_ , Matt. Because of me. And—and ruthless calculus. Hell’s Kitchen needs you more than it needs me. If I die, then—then there will be other people that can do what I do, but you’re—it’s not the same for you.”

His hands are actually shaking. He yanks back, as if she’s burned him. “ _Stop it_.”

“You know it’s true.” He turns his face away from her, swinging his legs off the couch, tangling his hands in his hair and tugging, like he wants to yank it out at the roots. “So don’t—don’t ask me not to sacrifice myself for you, if you plan to do it for me. That’s not fair.”

“You can’t ask me to let you _die_.”

“Then don’t ask me to let you kill yourself over me!” Her hair stings at her mouth. “Why does it seem so hard for you to understand that someone cares about you enough to want to keep you from doing something _really fucking stupid_?”

“Because I’m not—” He stops, swallows, starts again. “If you died, I don’t—I don’t know what I would be. I don’t know what I would _be_ , after. You’re—” His throat convulses. “Because I need you to—I just—”

“Matt—”

“Stick told me that—that I have to cut myself off from everyone,” Matt says. He’s fracturing all along the edges. “That—that in order for this to work I need to be alone. A lone soldier, without—without anyone or anything to make me vulnerable. And after tonight I’m half-tempted to think that he’s right.”

“Matt,” she says, but he shakes his head.

“But I can’t—that’s not something I can _do_. Not with Karen, or with Foggy—” his voice breaks “—or with you. You—you know _everything_ that I do, and you just—you don’t turn away from it, or—god, you should be running screaming and you’re just standing there making coffee in my kitchen like _nothing’s happened._ And I can’t lose that. I can’t—I can’t lose Karen, or Foggy, but if I lost you, if—if I didn’t get to you in time, if this happens again and they kill you, I don’t—it might actually kill me, and I can’t—”

Of course she’s crying. She can’t do anything without crying, lately. “ _Matt._ ”

“You make me better,” he says, and her heart stops. “You make me _better_. Since the beginning you—you make me think, you—you keep me straight. I—I hear you and I remember that there are things that are still good. Not just—not just out there, but in my head, and it sounds—that sounds so messed up, but it’s like—you’re there, and I’m even. I’m—I’m better. I’m a better person, I think better, I _am_ better, and it’s—” He reaches out, and brushes at her cheeks with his fingertips. “God, I just love you so much, and if you died I wouldn’t—”

She kisses him. She leans forward, leaning her good hand into the couch cushions, letting her bad one rest against his shoulder, and she kisses him, because she can’t think of what else to do. Matt draws a deep breath—of air, of her—and then he lifts his hands to her face and kisses her back, a spiraling, dizzying, out-of-control kiss that makes her flush to the tips of her fingers. Her cast feels heavy and ugly and awkward, but he doesn’t seem to notice; he touches her cheeks, her neck, traces his palms over her shoulders and down her arms to the bandages and breaks. They’re both fraying at the seams, she thinks, and weaves her fingers into his hair. They’re both shattered, and maybe, with this, they can start mending again. She curls her tongue past his teeth and fancies she can taste blood, still, but then it’s Matt, only Matt, his hands tangling in her damp curls and her fingernails scraping over his collarbones, teeth and breath and panic and _I need you_ , _stay, don’t leave, please, I need you._ She feels drunk, or dreamy, or all of the above, and when she presses her lips to the corner of his mouth, and to his jaw, the hollow underneath, he makes a noise like she’s actually physically wounded him, like he can’t breathe. He’s saying her name, over and over, almost like a prayer, and that hurts.

“Matt,” she says, and draws back. He chases her, nose bumping against hers, his mouth catching at the corner of her lips. “Matt, Matthew.”

He hums, and she has to kiss him again, her fingernails digging in behind his ears. Then she pulls back again, just a little, just enough. She lays her good hand flush against his heart. “That’s not going to happen. Okay? I’m done letting them hurt me, and I’m done letting them hurt you. I’m not going to die. Not because of this.”

He can’t seem to decide whether to pull away or kiss her again. “They’re not going to stop trying to kill you because you put your hands on your hips and tell them no.”

“I didn’t think they would.” Her voice quivers, and then steadies. “But that’s why you’re here. And I’m here to make sure they don’t kill you. We’re not doing this alone. Not either of us. Okay?”

She’s never seen him so lost. Matt closes his eyes and breathes, and Darcy curls her hand around the back of his neck and presses her forehead to his. “You’re not alone,” she says. “And I’m not alone. No matter what.”

Matt raises his hands, drawing his thumbs across her cheekbones. Then he closes his eyes. It sounds like he’s about to cry. He nods, just once. She runs her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck, and just stays there, breathing in the scent of him, familiar and real and _here_. She’s alive, and he’s alive. There’s something powerful in that.

It could be three minutes or thirty before she clears her throat, and blinks at him. “You love me?”

Matt touches her jaw again. Then he leans forward and ghosts his lips over hers, there, clinging, and then gone. He does it again, and again, just to be a shit. Her toes curl against the pillows. “Does that bother you?”

“Shit.” She leans forward and kisses him, edging her teeth along his bottom lip. “No,” she says. “No, that’s—bother’s not the word I’d use.”

She feels him smile against her mouth, just for an instant. “You sound happy,” he says, and presses his forefinger to the side of her throat, where her pulse is jumping. There’s a hint of wonder to the way he’s touching her that she’s never going to forget.

“Jesus, you’re such an _idiot_ ,” she says, and then kisses him again, just beneath the terrible bruise over his eye. He turns at the last possible instant and catches her mouth, and she wonders—how many times has he pretended not to know where she is, bumped into her, into walls, as if he doesn’t know exactly where everything is in space? Then a horrible thought strikes her. She yanks back. “If you’re telling me that because you plan to go off and be a martyr and want me to feel better about you dying then I swear to god I will destroy everything you care about, because I _cannot_ handle that right now, okay? I can’t—“

“Hey.” He strokes his thumb down the line of her jaw. He keeps _touching_ her, a palm against her bare arm, fingertips tracing the edges of her bruises. Matt tips forward, and rests his forehead to her temple. Darcy hiccups, her fingers hooked into the blanket draped across his knee. “I’m not going anywhere. I think martyrdom is a bit beyond me at the moment.”

She closes her eyes. “You love me,” she says again, and he rests his mouth against her skin, not a kiss, just a touch. “What about Claire?”

Matt stills, for a bone-chilling moment. Then he goes back to stroking his fingers down her arm. “I could have fallen for Claire. Someday, maybe. I feel like I could have. But we wouldn’t—she deserves better than me.”

Darcy laughs, sharp. “And I don’t?”

“You definitely deserve better,” he says, “but I’m selfish enough to wish you don’t figure that out for a long time.”

She has no idea what to say to that.

“I know you can’t trust me again yet, but—but I meant it. I mean it.” He brushes his nose against her temple, into her damp hair. “I fell in love with you when I was eighteen, and I never really stopped.”

She’s going to be sobbing really grossly if he keeps saying shit like that. Darcy turns, and presses her hands (well, her good hand; she doesn’t trust her cast on his bruises) to his cheek, kissing the scab from the fight with Stick, the bandaged patch just beneath his eye. “This is either the best ending to the worst night ever or the best start to the best day ever and I can’t figure out which.”

“Both is good,” Matt says, and she can’t help it. She laughs. She tips into him as best she can without hurting either of them more, and she laughs. Her shoulders shake. It might be hysteria, but if it is, she doesn’t care. She laughs until she can’t breathe, and then slowly she eases out again.

“You love me,” she says, a third time. Matt hums again, deep in the back of his throat.

“Hard to believe?”

“Not really.” And it’s not, honestly. “I’m just not sure why.”

He doesn’t say anything. Not for a minute or two. Then he touches his mouth to her temple. “You’re a firework,” he says. “Not a sparkler or a Catherine wheel, but one of the big rosettas, the ones that can be a thousand different colors and swallow half the sky. You’re loud, and bright, and you always take me by surprise. You light up the dark places, and make them look like home. That’s why.”

“Stop. You’re making me cry, and it’s nasty.” She fans her face. “ _Stop_.”

She thinks the catch in his breathing might be a laugh. Matt plays with a strand of half-wet hair at the base of her neck, and just rocks into her, _staying_ there, and she’s going to die from all of these feelings and intensities and just the way he’s _there,_ like he’s not planning on walking away. Darcy closes her eyes and swallows hard. Then she raises her head again, and says, “I love you, Matt.”

It’s easy as breathing, easy as life, but for a second she thinks he doesn’t believe her. Then, slowly, he lifts one hand, sliding his fingers into her hair, cupping the back of her head and drawing her to him again. His mouth clings to hers, and there’s no space between them anymore. She doesn’t want there to be. Matt draws back, slowly, and kisses the side of her nose, pressing his mouth to her cheekbone. When he sighs, she can feel it. “Yeah?

“Yeah.” She leans forward and sets her lips to the place where his neck and shoulder join. He shivers a little. “Yeah. For a long time.”

“Oh,” he says, in a very small voice, and she kisses the question off his mouth. She’s not sure why the thought of telling Matt scared her so much, when she looked at Claire and said _I don’t know what I want_ , because now she has this, and she’ll be damned if she lets it go.

“Would have thought you’d noticed.” She noses the underside of his jaw. “Considering.”

“I guess—” He turns his head, catches the soft spot just in front of her ear with his lower lip. “I guess I told myself that I had to be wrong. Or that it was—something else. I don’t know. You dated a lot.”

“So did you.” She’s very dizzy, and she doesn’t think it’s because of the concussion. “We’re both really dumb. Jesus Christ.”

Matt presses his nose close into her hair, and heaves a breath that she can feel all the way down to her finally-not-numb toes. She curls into him, careful not to touch the torn places. He smells like rubbing alcohol and the Hudson and Matt, underneath, and Darcy rests her broken wrist against his ribs and closes her eyes. She’s feeling too much, and she can’t shake the sense that it’s all going to fall apart.

“Don’t you dare get yourself killed,” she says into his throat. “You’re not allowed to die on me.”

Matt tangles his fingers in her hair, and shakes his head. “Sometimes it doesn’t work like that.”

“The hell it doesn’t. I’ve told you so. You’re not allowed to die if I tell you not to.” Her voice cracks. “It’s a rule of the universe. You do as I say. No questions asked.”

“No questions asked,” Matt repeats solemnly, and she pinches him in the ribs. He shies away from her fingers, and then he’s laughing, and she’s laughing, and when the laughter turns to tears it’s not shameful. It just is.

.

.

.

In all honesty, she’d be perfectly content if the world just burns to the ground while she’s sitting there, on the couch, playing with Matt’s fingers and listening to him breathe. (Okay, not _entirely_ content—she’d have to know that Foggy and Karen and Kate and Jen were safe—but other than that, cool. Bye, world. You suck a lot.) But of course that’s not how life works. She wants to sit there forever, but what she _has_ to do is call Claire to let her know that nobody’s dead; worry about Kate and Foggy and the TMZ interview; change clothes (she uses Matt’s, and that leads to more kissing which is loads of amazing); and then construct a believable enough lie that Fisk’s pet cops don’t go hunting for Matt.

She also has to help him come up with a better story for a) the wreckage that is his apartment, b) the fact that he looks like death warmed over, and c) her miraculous return that is better than a) an orientalistic blind white ninja rip-off, b) a very enthusiastic painter, and c) space wizards. And then, of course, there’s the turning her garbage bag of bloody, crusty, dirty clothes over to the police dealio.

By the time her post-rescue interview is over, she’s pretty sure that Brett never wants to see her face again. She’s also 99.9% certain that he’s not buying the whole “the mask rescued me and took me to get my arm fixed while I was unconscious” story, but half of that is technically true, and since she’s a victim they’re not about to make her take a polygraph test, so there’s not much he can do about it.

He does take the whole yakuza-warehouse-on-the-waterfront thing seriously, though. Same with Nobu being dead, and the devil of Hell’s Kitchen breaking her out. It’s the part where she fainted and woke up in a phone booth with a cast on her arm and all her fingers splinted that Brett’s sticking on, but it’s seriously the only thing she can think of to tell him. _Dear Brett: Foggy’s possibly-ex best friend, who is also blind, is actually the vigilante you’ve been looking for, and I took him home instead of calling you to let you know I was alive because I was a bit more worried about the fact that he was possibly bleeding out than reporting to the police for a check-up and possible death at the hand of Fisk’s minions, kthx, xo, D._ That’d go over well.

God, this is just been a day of such extremes. By any rights, she should be catatonic in a corner somewhere. She’s still not sure why she isn’t.

Jen waits outside during the interview. Darcy’s certain that if it weren’t for policy, Jen would have bullied her way into the interview room, plonked herself in the chair right next to Darcy’s, and acted as her defense counsel. Jen looks like something’s ripped her apart and stitched her back together badly, and when Darcy had opened Matt’s door, Jen had bent at the waist as if someone had just hit her with a baseball bat. Darcy had darted forward and crashed into her, and Jen had actually lifted her off her feet with the force of her hug, stroking her hair and smearing mascara-y tears against Darcy’s cheek. “Oh my god,” she’d said, over and over. “Oh my _god_.”

Karen had nearly been worse. Her lips were cracked from biting, her eyes overly red, and as soon as Darcy had been set back on her feet she’d pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, and burst into tears. So of course Darcy had started crying again too, and it had descended into a mess of weeping and threats against the yakuza.

It was almost enough to keep either of them from asking about Matt and Matt’s floor. Almost.

Jen’s quiet now. Her arm is hooked through Darcy’s, as if to pin her down to earth, like if she keeps Darcy right by her side and in her line of sight nothing will happen ever again. Karen had slipped away once she’d made sure that they were safe and the interview was over with, and to be frank, Darcy doesn’t blame her. Karen had nearly died in the 15th Precinct; it’s not the sort of place anyone wants to go back to. Besides, she says she has an appointment, and usually that means she’s meeting with Ben. _Life goes on._

When Brett turns her loose, Darcy and Jen leave the precinct without a single word. As soon as they turn down Nott Street, though, Jen says, “This is more than just the Goodmans, isn’t it?”

Darcy shuts her eyes. “You’ve been talking to Karen.”

“I asked,” Jen corrects. “She d-didn’t tell me anything. Said I should ask you instead.”

There’s a bit of an accusation, there. _You should have told me yourself._ She’s right. God, Darcy just wants to sleep. “Yeah.” That sounds familiar. “There’s—there’s a lot of that going around right now.”

Jen clears her throat. “Look. I—I get that you w-want to protect me, or—or whatever it is. And I know that—that telling me might be a problem, since I work for the D-DA’s office, and all of the rest of it, b-but D-Darcy, I can’t go through that again. I _can’t_.” Her voice breaks. “You’re my _sister_. If—if someone’s trying to hurt you—”

“Oh, Jen,” Darcy says, and stops, slipping her arms around Jen’s waist and resting her forehead against Jen’s shoulder. Jen chokes, and hides her face in Darcy’s hair, shaking. “I’m sorry.” She swallows hard. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you. I’m sorry.”

 _It’s not fair_ , she thinks. _Way to be a fucking hypocrite, Lewis_. She lectures Matt for not telling her things, and then she turns around and does it to everyone else, falling into that same fucking trap of thinking she knows better, that she can keep people safe with sheer will. Knowledge is safety, not hope, not acting the martyr. Knowledge puts you at risk and keeps you safe in a double-edged sword.

She hears a bell tolling, and thinks she’s hallucinating for a moment. Then she turns, and sees the high spire of St. Patrick’s Cathedral edging out from behind a brownstone. “Jen,” she says again, and Jen sniffs loudly and squeezes her arms tight around Darcy’s neck before pulling back. “I’ll tell you everything I can. All right?There’s some stuff that’s more—it’s not mine to explain. And it would cause more problems than solving them. But what I can tell you, I will.”

“Good,” Jen says.

“But we have to, uh. Can I make a quick stop first?”

The inside of St. Patrick’s is just as empty and lonely and sad as it was weeks and lifetimes ago. Darcy dips her fingers into the holy water, touching her forehead once ( _sorry, Father P_ ) and then glances back at Jen. Jen’s eyes are huge, and keep flicking from the hanging cross, complete with dead, sad Jesus, to the stained glass windows, and finally to the confession box at the far back. “Darcy.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re Jewish.”

“I know.”

“No,” Jen says, her voice thready. “No, I’m—I’m pretty sure you’re g-genuinely confused right now. You’re not even a _good_ Jew. You’re a terrible Jew. You wrote your political science thesis on the rise of fundamentalist politics in the Middle East and said that God was actually dead. The only reason you still even identify as J-Jewish is so you don’t get kicked out of that deli near Columbia.”

“And because of challah,” says Darcy. “And, y’know, genetics.”

“And because of challah and genetics.”

“Wait.” Darcy laughs. “No, Jen. I’m not here to worship. I’m just here to see a—” She stops. Does Father Patrick count as a friend, if she’s only met him once? She feels like he does, but who knows? Maybe they’re just allies in the fight against Matt’s insanity. Or whatever. “I’m here to see someone. I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Okay,” says Jen, in the way someone would say “ _time to commit you_.” Still, she just heaves her purse over her shoulder again (Darcy’s not a good Jew, but Jen is, complete with fasting and everything else) and looks highly uncomfortable. She clears her throat. “I’ll—uh. Do you want me to wait in here, or—”

“I mean, it’d probably be safer.” Darcy points. “Sit in a pew. I’ll be back in a bit.”

Jen sits in a pew, and pulls out her phone. Darcy waits until she hears the click of 2048 number blocks before crossing the room, and opening a door marked _lounge_.

She’s not quite sure what to expect, judging by the word _lounge_ , but what’s beyond the door is most certainly not a lounge. It’s a wide room with a long table, complete with folding chairs and a coffee machine with a milk-steamer attached. On the far side of the room there’s an open closet with a light on inside. She can hear something rustling inside. Darcy knocks on the door twice, and clears her throat. “Um. Is anybody back here?”

Something thunks against the floor. Then Father Lantom pokes his head out of the closet, and his eyebrows march up his forehead. “Hello,” he says, very, very surprised. “Uh. Give me a moment.”

“Are you okay?” Darcy sets her bag on the long table, and crosses the room to peek into the closet. It looks like a bunch of donated stuff, judging by how much of it is broken and/or how many paper bags of canned food there are. There’s a stepladder set up against one wall, and at the base of it there’s a torn cardboard box. She taps a can of peaches with her shoe. “You need help back here, Father P?”

Father Lantom blinks at her. Then his lips part. “You’re that woman,” he says, and she tugs a strand of brown hair forward over her shoulder, curling it around her fingers. “Lizzy. Your hair is—different.”

“It was a wig, last time.” She crouches, and picks up one of the peach cans. “You trying to hurt yourself, here? Because I feel like I read somewhere that that’s kind of a no-no.”

Father P gestures at the torn box in answer. “I didn’t think you’d come back,” he says, and kneels down beside her to start picking up cans. She can see his eyes lingering on her broken wrist, the stitches and the bruises, but he doesn’t say a word. “It’s been a couple weeks.”

“Yeah, well. Things were busy.” She drops a can of prunes (seriously, who the fuck buys prunes for donations? It’s like punishing people for needing donations in the first place.) into her lap. “And I didn’t know if you’d really want to see me again. Considering.”

Father P pulls a folded cardboard box out from underneath a stack of laundry baskets, and produces tape from nowhere. “To be entirely honest, I wasn’t sure if I wanted you to come back, either. Not then, anyway. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Because you’ve had another visit from the guy that the news loves to talk about?” He _better_ not have left the apartment while she was gone. She’ll kill him.

“Because I wasn’t sure if you’d survived,” says Father P, and there’s something, some old ache in his voice that makes her want to hug him. Which is so weird, because she has never in her life before considered hugging a priest. Darcy waits until he tapes the bottom of the box together before passing some of her cans up to him, one at a time.  

“Here I am,” she says, belatedly, when she catches Father P watching her. “With my real hair and my concussion and PTSD and everything. Reporting for clean-up duty.”

Father P sets the box beside her, and she dumps the rest of her cans into it before straightening. He seems to be debating with himself about something, in a way that reminds her very strongly of Ben Urich. Then he says, “Do you want coffee?”

Her lips curve without her permission. Darcy nods once. “Yeah. Coffee would be great.”

The ancient espresso machine makes more demonic noises than seem entirely acceptable in a Catholic church, but it’s good coffee, so the dichotomy’s forgiven. She hums deep in the back of her throat at the taste of it. “This is Kenyan,” she says, and Father P blinks twice before sitting in the chair next to her, stirring sugar into his cup.

“I spent some time in Africa when I was younger. It’s not quite the same, for a lot of reasons, but I still like it better than other kinds of beans. I guess it’s an old habit.”

Darcy tastes it again, and then adds a bit of sugar before leaning back in her chair. Her arm is throbbing. It’s highly uncomfortable. “Well, as someone who worked in a coffee shop for six years, you have earned my seal of approval. Even if it was a Starbucks.”

Father P smiles into his cup.

“I know that this is kind of…weird, I guess. I mean, I’m not exactly here to confess or anything, considering, y’know.” She tugs at her collar. “Well, yeah. I guess—I guess I just wanted to see how you were doing. Considering I’m pretty sure you take confessions from the devil.”

“If I did,” says Father P, placidly, “I wouldn’t be at liberty to tell you.”

“Obviously.” She sips at her coffee, stroking her thumb along the rim of the mug. “I dunno. Things have been kind of hard. For a lot of us, I guess. Everyone that—” _everyone that knows? Everyone that’s been changed by it?_ “There was a thing that happened. And it’s hard. I guess I just wanted to see if this place was still the same.”

Father P glances at her broken wrist again. Then he leans back in his chair, setting his coffee cup aside. “You’re welcome here whenever you want, Lizzy. Even if you’re not exactly religious, we hold bingo competitions on Fridays.”

Darcy snorts. “Technically those are kind of illegal. You know that, right?”

“There’s no official betting. Besides, most of the grandmothers that show up are from cop families. I get by.” He rubs a hand over his jaw. “Do you want to talk about what brought you here? If you don’t, we can go back to talking coffee beans. Though I have the feeling you’ll outclass me on that topic.”

“I dunno. You look like the kind of guy who knows his beans.” Darcy tucks her cast close against her stomach, turning her face to look at the corkboard pinned to the wall. There are a bunch of flyers attached, some about bake sales, others about school concerts, neighborhood events. It’s very normal. “Like I said.” Her throat tightens. “Something happened, and—well. Some people nearly died, including—”

She almost says _Matt._ Father P watches her quietly, steady and silent, and she shakes her head. “Well, including me. And him. And it scared me. And I guess I saw this place, and I remembered that you know him, and I wanted to just…find somewhere safe. Ish.”

Father P lifts his cup to his lips, taking a breath of steam. Then he says, “I see.”

“Is that weird?”

“A few centuries ago, churches used to grant sanctuary. So no, it’s not strange. Just a bit anachronistic.”

“Smack that on a T-shirt and sell it. You’d probably make a mint. _The Catholic Church: We’re not strange, just anachronistic._ ”

His lips twitch.

“I’m a lawyer,” Darcy says, all of a sudden. “I’m—I don’t really look like one, but I am. All my friends are lawyers, or work in the law. Except for one or two,” she adds, thinking of Claire, and of Kate. “There should be a contradiction, there, that I can accept a vigilante. That I can approve of it.”

“Is this a confession?” Father P asks, in a wry voice. She shakes her head.

“I mean, I guess it is if you want it to be. I don’t believe in God. Never have, really. Sorry.”

Father P shrugs. “My beliefs don’t change because of yours. Yours won’t change because of mine. It’s a fact of life, and there are all sorts of people in the world. I’d be a failure as a human being if I couldn’t recognize that much.”

That’s…actually kind of impressive. “Makes you better than my downstairs neighbor. When she heard I was born Jewish she started sticking pamphlets about the Rapture under my door. It took us six months to get her to stop.”

He gets this really pained look on his face. “I can’t speak for others, but on behalf of myself—I’m so sorry.”

She laughs, a little. “Thanks. But yeah. As an atheist, y’know, I’m not exactly—I studied religion in school, same as anybody, and I probably would have minored in it if I hadn’t been double-majoring already, but at the same time I just…I dunno. The leap of faith is beyond me. I need proof for things. I need to see something to believe it, and—and to understand it. So in a weird way, I kind of admire people who are religious, because they can make that leap where I can’t.”

Father P nods once, stirring his coffee absently with his spoon.  

“Charles Dickens had this thing with his books where he said that only human beings are truly capable of evil, because only humans have the concept of morality.” She traces the handle of her cup. “Animals love the same way we do, but that idea that one thing is inherently good, and another thing is inherently bad, they don’t have that. So when a cat tortures a mouse before eating it, or a ladybug eats another ladybug, or—or whatever, that’s not a cruel or evil act, because they don’t know what evil _is_. Human beings, though, they can be cruel. Wherever morality comes from, whether you think it’s something we learned from some kind of invisible man in the sky, or something that’s naturally in us, or it’s something that we develop through comparison and study and growth, humans can be good, and humans can be evil. And you can be straddle the two, try and stop someone from doing something terrible with whatever methods you can get your hands on, good and bad. Be a chaotic neutral, maybe.” She rubs her nose. “I feel like that might be what he’s trying to balance. Those two different parts of himself. The part that tries to do the right thing, and the part that uses—that uses violence to achieve the same ends. And—I don’t know.”

Father P doesn’t say anything for a long time. He finishes his coffee, and then gets up to start another cup. “Like I said, I can’t talk about confessions, and I can’t tell you what’s been said to me in confidence. I can’t say whether or not you’re right.”

“Of course.”

“And no one person can save another, Lizzy.” He goes to the mini-fridge underneath the table, collecting the milk. “Saving people isn’t something that’s the act of one human being, or even one deity, for that matter. For someone to be saved, they have to want to save themselves just as much as they want to be rescued. Otherwise that rescue doesn’t stick, and all that happens is that they fall right back to where they were, whether it’s drugs or alcohol or whatever issues they’re sorting out. You have to want to help yourself, before you can be helped.”

“Yeah, I know.” She watches him steam the milk for a minute or two. “My best friend was murdered when I was ten. The guy who did it is still—you know. He’s in Atlanta, I think. Nobody ever arrested him. But that’s not the point,” she adds, when Father P looks like he wants to say something. “I just—I think that if that hadn’t happened, if I hadn’t gone through that, experienced that, then I wouldn’t be able to reconcile the parts of him that I know. The devil part, the angry part, the one that drags people into alleys and destroys them, I wouldn’t be able to accept that in the way that I can because of how Eli died. I can’t look at the legal system in the way that other people do, because it fucked up—sorry. It messed up a lot of things, when Eli was killed. I know where it’s broken, and there are some parts of it that we can’t fix. There are loopholes we can’t use and people we want to hurt but we can’t. And I guess, because of that, I can…understand it better.” She gives Father P a considering look, and then says, “And approve of it.”

He doesn’t say _I’m sorry_ or _what happened_ or any of it. He just nods.

“I don’t know how to make other people get that. A friend of mine, he—he thinks it’s horrible, that it’s a betrayal of everything we were working for, and in some ways he’s right, but in others it’s—it’s hard to explain. I want him to understand, but I don’t think he _should_ , because he’s—he’s a much better person than I am, and I don’t want him to lose that, I don’t. Not right now, maybe not ever. And I can’t tell him that sometimes I wish I could do what he—what the devil does, not—not the flipping and the fighting, but the _punishment_. Because there are people who do so many wrongs that never, ever get punished for it, and it’s not fair, no matter how you look at it.” She runs out of breath, and heaves another. “I want to think that I’m a better person than I am, but I know that I’m not. Because people have hurt me, and I want to hurt them back.”

“It’s a natural human emotion, to want that.” Father P settles back in his chair, and sets his spoon in the saucer. She’s starting to understand what might be so addicting about this confession thing. Not the idea that your sins are absolved, or whatever it is, but just—just _talking_. Providing an outlet for things that might not otherwise be said. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting it. It’s the doing where the ethics start getting murky.”

“Murky is the nicest word for it.” Darcy takes a deep breath, and sips at the coffee again. It’s soothing, somehow, to just sit and drink coffee, like nothing’s happened, like she didn’t just shoot someone, like she hadn’t just watched someone burn to death, like she hadn’t just stitched up her best friend and told him she loved him and then lied to the police. “People protect themselves, I guess. And sometimes in the process other people get hurt. What makes it good or evil depends on the scale of the destruction.”

“There was a lot of discussion in some of my upper-level psychology classes about that sort of thing.” Father P leans his elbows on his knees, lacing his hands together as if he’s praying. “Where evil comes from, what part of the human mind allows for it. Nature vs. nurture, Jeffrey Dahmer, Fred and Rose West, Ted Bundy, all the big names came into it, but there were littler things, too. What makes one person give money to a homeless veteran on the street, and another pass them by? Is it something in the chemistry of our brains, the construction of our personalities, that makes one person do something benevolent, and another simply remain apathetic? Or go a darker route, even. We could never come up with just one answer, and when I went to seminary I decided that that’s sort of the point. We’re not _supposed_ to have the answer. We take each day as it comes, and each person as they are, and the cosmic nature of good and evil—that’s for higher minds and higher beings than _Homo sapiens_.”

Darcy shakes her head once. “If that’s the case we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. We can’t theorize about the origins of morality and not be capable of understanding where it comes from.”

“And yet if you put a monkey in a room full of typewriters, someday he’ll rewrite _Hamlet._ Doesn’t mean he’ll understand it. He just has to put the words in the right order.”

“That’s true, but I feel like it’s kind of beside the point.” She sighs. “I did have something to say, but I don’t really remember what it was.”

Father P gestures her on. “If you sit for a minute it could come back.”

She snorts. “You don’t get many visitors here, do you?”

“I get enough. There aren’t a lot who will argue the origins of evil with me, though.” He shrugs. “I enjoy moral debates probably far more than I should.”

“Isn’t it kind of your job, though?”

“Mostly I just say ‘mm’ a lot and put my master’s in psychology to good use.”

“Yours is a hard-knock life.” She swirls her coffee in the cup. “I don’t think it’s going to come back, sadly. It was something very eloquent about evil and humanity and the ends-justify-the-means question, but it’s gone. Thanks, concussion.”

Father P shrugs. “Maybe you’re just getting old.”

“Hah.” Darcy finishes her coffee. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that even if he’s chaotic neutral in how he does things, it doesn’t keep him from being good. I don’t know how to make him understand it, other than…I don’t know. Being there.”

“Is being there the best thing for you?”

Darcy shrugs. “Who knows. I wouldn’t have had a broken wrist and a knife to my throat if I _wasn’t_ there, but I’m also pretty sure if I wasn’t there things could have been way worse. They could have gone a lot better, too, but there’s no way forme to know that.” She stops. “I am sounding surprisingly self-actualized right now. What is this.”

“Sometimes our subconscious surprises us,” says Father P, and cracks his knuckles, thoughtfully. “How long has it been since you slept?”

“With or without nightmares?”

“There’s your answer right there. Exhaustion can do it, too.”

A laugh bubbles out of her. “Honestly I think it’s probably the concussion. It’s keeping me from second-guessing myself. I’m also probably going to start mixing up words in a minute, because I’m just kind of feelings’d out, but whatever.” She puts her shoulders back. “Anyway. A very wise person told me that if I’m going to be in the position I’m in right now, I have to—I have to decide whether or not I can handle it. Being a part of the people that stands on either side, knowing who he is and who he becomes, and—and staying in spite of that. But I feel like that’s where she and I differ, because she thought of it as staying _in spite_ of the differences. I’m staying _because_ of them. I think it’s obvious that it’s not the best thing for anyone, being in the line of fire the way I am, the way—the way my friends are, but if I’m going to be completely honest with myself, I do better in a fight than I do during peace. I need something to fight for. I’m just—I’m angry at the world, and I can’t flip and kick and punch, but I can fight in different ways. And this is just another way for me to do it. I guess it’s kind of selfish.”

Father P leans back in his chair. “Not from where I’m sitting. It sounds more like the opposite, actually.”

“See, that’s where you lost me. Sorry.” She scrapes a fingernail over her cheek. “Back to our little devil friend. I don’t think I can really _help_ him, exactly, not in—not in the way he needs. We both need a lot of therapy, though neither of us are going to get it. I know him and I know myself, and it’s just…not a thing that we can afford, in a lot of ways. Not to mention that I’m more than a little chaotic neutral myself, so I don’t know how I help. But I can try the best I can, and, y’know. Maybe someday some of it will stick.”

“Speaking of chaotic neutral.” He raises his cup to her. “There’s a Dungeon and Dragons circle that meets in the lounge every other week. We’re looking for another character to add to the group.”

“Shut up,” says Darcy, delighted. “You are _not_ a D&D person.”

“My high elf disagrees.”

“Best priest _ever_ ,” she says, and he actually turns a little pink, he’s so pleased. She drains her cup. “As much as I’d love to continue this discussion—and yeah, seriously, I kind of want to stay here all day now, this is awesome—I really need to go. I left my—my sister sitting in the pews out there, and I think she feels like her faithful Jewish butt is going to start combusting. I can feel her getting antsy from here. Sorry for scaring you. And, y’know. Being kind of weird.”

He stands. “Come back soon, Lizzy. If only so I don’t think you’re dead.” 

“Darcy,” she says, and smiles. “My name’s Darcy.”

His mouth quirks. “Might have heard of you. Can’t swear to it, though.”

She snorts. Her ears feel uncomfortably warm. “Hope it wasn’t anything too scarring.”

“Definitely heard worse.”

He puts out a hand, and she shakes it. She’s just collecting her purse when her brain clicks. “I remembered what I was going to say.”

“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

“Evil is a human invention. It exists, same way everything else does, but it’s not some—some untouchable concept. It’s done by people and to people, and forgetting that means you’ve already lost the fight against it.”

Father P’s mulling that over when Darcy goes up on tiptoe, and kisses his cheek. “I’ll see you around, okay? Keep yourself safe.”   

“Same to you,” he says, and for the first time in days, she feels like things might just start being all right again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who are more comic-savvy, CC is Cecilia Reyes from _X-Men_.
> 
> I kind of stole Karen's thunder with the "you're not alone" bit, but, y'know, I feel like it's different enough to fly. Meh.


	14. Shot Through The Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear to god, I don't know why I edit shit in Microsoft Word. I get it perfectly grammatical, and then I stick it in the box in AO3, and it puts things in number lists. What the fuck. 
> 
> Some triggers for: stitch jobs (Matt's dumb), discussion of a past rape, some vague description of a dead body (shotgun to the face, not pretty), discussion of heroin, and panic attacks. 
> 
> Kate's back again, you guys! Also, I think this is the first time O'Reilly has shown up in person. (In case you're interested, Brigid O'Reilly is a character from Marvel-616, though obviously I've amended her to TPoW; she works mainly with Cloak and Dagger [those two are my absolute fucking favorites don't even start me on Cloak and Dagger] and later becomes a vigilante known as Mayhem.) 
> 
> I think with the next chapter we will finally be two-thirds of the way through and/or done with "The Path of the Righteous." I have to spend most of today rewatching the show from Nelson v. Murdock on (pray for my mortal soul) and shuffle some scenes around in the drafts I'm working on, so it might be three days before my next update, instead of two.
> 
> I just want to say, again, how much all of your messages mean to me. They inspire me; they make me smile; they make me cry; they give me hope. I can't tell you how astounding it is to have this little fic so loved and admired by so many people, and how overwhelming (how very, very overwhelming) it is to have all of you so invested in it. I can only hope that I continue to fulfill your expectations in the chapters to come. 
> 
> Cheers and much love.

“We do still need to talk, y’know.”

Darcy sighs, and tucks her nose into his collarbone. Really, she’d meant to go and stay in Claire’s empty apartment until she was certain that Fisk’s men weren’t going to come for her, but then she’d come back to get the crap that Jen and Karen had brought for her from Matt’s apartment to find Matt passed out on the couch with three popped stitches, because _apparently_ he just sleeps so hardcore that her stitch job just can’t handle it. So at risk at escalating the whole (very excellent) kissing thing, she’d just told him she was staying here (“to make sure you don’t kill yourself following me around because I _know you will_ , you stalker, you seriously have to start knocking over trash cans or something—” “—that’s a little beside the point if I’m trying to—don’t jab the needle so hard, Jesus—”) and that he’d share the bed with her, because she wasn’t about to wake up to find him dead, first of all, and secondly her hands and feet get cold.

The second part was mostly bullshit, but whatever.

“We’ve been talking a lot. All day, even. Well, most of the day. Unless there’s some other terrible plot that you haven’t told me about yet, in which case, what the hell.”

“You know what I mean,” Matt says. His eyebrows are doing that magnet thing where he’s pretending he’s not worried, but he actually is. “About this.”

“I plead trauma,” she says, when she realizes Matt’s still—not watching her, exactly, but paying attention. It should feel odd to lie there with Matt so close, one arm draped over her waist and close enough that his breath touches her lips every time he exhales, but it’s not. It’s like—it’s an extension of what they were, and are, some natural evolution that makes her toes curl. Or something. She’s not really coherent at the moment, even though so far she has been very sadly unsexified. “I say we should wait until I’ve had extensive therapy.”

“Darcy.”

“Aren’t I supposed to be the one getting you to share your icky mushy feelings?” She rests her broken hand on the pillow between them, and lifts her chin so she can look him in the face. “I feel like this is a role reversal of epic proportions.”

“We may even get our own page on TVTropes,” says Matt gravely, and she’d pinch him for that if not for the fact that he’s still pulling off the Broken Tin Soldier look so superbly. He lifts a hand and traces a line down her arm. “What do you want to do?”

“I mean, there are a number of things I want to do with you while we’re in bed. But I don’t think either of us are up for them at the moment.”

He grins, and kisses the tip of her nose. Then he nips it. Darcy yelps, and squishes her face into the pillow. “Not _fair_ ,” she says, but it comes out as “neefee.”

“Untranslatable,” Matt says. Seriously, she’s going to whack him with a pillow, to hell with the Broken Tin Soldier. Then his smile fades a little. “You said something, in the office. You were right about this being bad timing. Fisk, and all the rest of it—and everything that happened last night. It’s—” He clears his throat. “I’d get it if you wanted to hold it off.”

Darcy considers that for a long time. Then she props herself up on her elbows, and looks down at him. “Matt,” she says, “are you pulling a Harry?”

Matt’s eyebrows crease. “Harry Styles?”

“No, you dink.” She prods him in the shoulder. “Are you pulling a Dumbledore’s funeral Harry? _I’m sorry, Ginny, but Voldemort loves me too much. The two of us cannot be until I turn him into weird soot-butterflies, thus freeing the playing field for our awkward Quidditch-based love._ Because that’s sweet and everything, but you’re not getting rid of me that easy.”

“No, that’s—” He shakes his head. “It’s been a terrible few days. If you—if you wanted to change your mind, after things steady out, I’d—understand. That’s all I’m saying.”

“What happened to being too selfish to letting me go? That was oddly sexy, even if it reveals _so many_ deep-seated issues, you have no idea.”

“Darcy.”

“You can tell if I’m lying,” she says, and hooks hair behind her ear. “Listen to my heart, okay?I’m not—I’m not second-guessing this. Yes, it’s shitty timing, but it’s always gonna be shitty timing. You’re a vigilante, and I’m—I’m good at sticking my nose into holes with bad things at the bottom of them. I’d rather it be bad timing at the start and have it ease out then never have the chance at all. Because you know that’s what it’d turn into, if we let it lie. It’d be super awkward. Like, _Arrow_ -level Oliver-Felicity longing looks awkward. Don’t make me pull that shit, Matt.”

“You’re babbling,” he says, and shifts, as if he’s going to get up. Darcy nudges her nose against his shoulder.

“Fine, we’ll cosplay. Though according to some people, I apparently can’t do blonde well. It’d be interesting to see you try to pull off an Oliver Queen, though, seriously—though you both do have some awesome scruff—”

“Darcy.”

“Sorry.” She lets out a breath. “I mean it when I say it, Matt. It’s not just—I’m not just here because I’m scared. Well, I am scared, because of a lot of reasons—mostly because you’re hot like sriracha and know basically every ridiculous sad thing about me and have this weird ability to make me smile no matter what—but I’m not scared of _you_. And I’m not scared of being with you, and I’m not gonna get cold feet, or change my mind, or—or any of that.” She rests her hand over his heart. “What scares me is that we’re going to get caught in a doom loop of you trying to rescue me by pushing me away, and me getting righteously angry about it. There are only so many times we can go through that before whatever this is breaks.”

Matt sighs, and his hand flexes on her hip. “I’m not going to promise not to worry about you. Or not to want to keep you safe.”

“And I’m not going to promise those things, either. Worry is fine. Wanting to protect is fine. Taking it all on yourself, not sharing, not—not _telling_ me shit because you’re trying to keep me safe—that’s not okay.” God, why is this so hard? “It’s not you I’m scared of, Matt. And it’s not the devil that frightens me, either. It’s your hero complex.”

He gets a twist to his mouth that she usually only sees when someone’s pissed him off. Darcy just looks at him, though, and slowly, it fades. She can feel his heart under her palm, steady and strong. “I don’t know if I can change that.”

“All I want you to do is try. I may know exactly fuck-all about—whatever this sort of thing is, but like…I know they don’t work without people talking about things. Even people with normal lives who worry about shit like Victoria’s Secret sales and getting promoted at the office.”

His lips twitch. “You’d be bored.”

“Damn straight I’d be bored. Give me the hot angsty vigilante and the nightly walks on the wild side, thank you very much.”

“Hot like sriracha?” he asks, his eyebrows waggling. She hides her face in the pillow again and groans.

“Gnmdu.”

Matt tips her chin up and kisses her, which ends the babbling nicely. Darcy rests her good hand on the curve of his bicep, tugging on his lower lip with her teeth (seriously, she’s surprised she hasn’t managed to try this before now, because his mouth is amazing) before pulling away. “We’re never gonna be able to have sriracha again, are we?”

“I don’t know.” He kisses her mouth. “I like the idea of sriracha around.”

“As soon as you can walk without falling down I’m seriously going to beat the crap out of you, I swear to god.” She frowns. “Wait, if we had sriracha all the time, wouldn’t you just like—lose all sense of smell because of how spicy it is?”

Matt hiccups, and ducks his head to hide his face. His shoulders are shaking. It makes her overwhelmingly sad to realize that she hasn’t seen him so happy in months. Possibly years. And what kind of friend is she, that she never really noticed it until now? “It’s not that spicy,” he says, when he can breathe again. “You just can’t eat spicy things.”

“Excuse you, I have curry on the regular.” She pauses. “Which you would _know_ , because you can apparently smell curry on me, which is…I’m not gonna say it’s weird because your superpowers are kind of cool in a lot of ways—”

“ _Kind of_ cool,” he repeats, as if she’s just broken his brain.

“—but the fact that you can smell what I had for breakfast yesterday or whatever is just kind of weird.”

“I can also hear when you lie,” Matt says, smiling in a way she hasn’t seen since college, before that night when he’d come in bloody and alone and so very, very lost. He hesitates, and then sets his fingertips to the tundra swan tattooed on the inside of her right wrist. “And I can feel these.”

“I mean, they are raised up a little.” Especially the one on the back of her neck. “Wait. What do I smell like?”

Matt huffs. “Why are you obsessed with this?”

“I mean, as far as senses go, smell is like—the one that a lot of people don’t think of, but it has a lot of bearing on everything we do. Y’know? Half the stuff you taste is actually stuff you’re smelling. Or I don’t remember the statistic, exactly, but like…that’s why you can’t taste things when your nose is all plugged when you have a cold. Because of how much you smell when you’re eating.” She stops. “Or something. Anyway. I’m just—I’m interested. If my—” boyfriend? Sex puppy? She’s not sure “—if you can smell me from like…six blocks away, I want to know what you’re smelling. I have smell rights.”

“You’re so weird,” Matt says, but there’s the sunshine smile from the alley, and it makes her skin prickle all over and her toes curl with how much she just _wants_ him. His eyelashes flutter, and goddamn if he hasn’t picked up on it too, the sudden surge of want that’s making her body wind tight and her heart ache. He pushes his thumb into the hollow of her hip, which is unfair in a million kinds of ways, and brushes his nose against hers. He doesn’t kiss her, though, because he’s an _asshole_.

“The tattoo,” he says, “on your wrist. The ink was mixed. Two different shades of black. There are different chemical densities in it that don’t match the others.”

“Chemical densities.”

“Two different inks.” He swipes his thumb over her hipbone. “I don’t know what the names would be. They just smell different, that’s all.”

She feels a bit breathless. “I guess I’ll have to take your word for it, skippy.”

He lifts his hand again, then touches the band around her upper left arm. She shifts a little so he can feel the edges of it, moving her forearm to get the cast out of the way. “This one…” He tips his head a little. “It’s multicolored, isn’t it? I can smell red dye.”

“Red and black.” She swallows “For my mom. I’ve had it since I was sixteen.”

“I never knew that.”

She shrugs, and Matt rests his hand on her arm, palm flat against her skin, tracing the crease of her elbow. “I have one for everyone that changed my life somehow. Sometimes it takes me ages to design them, but, y’know. Even the bad people. I’m working on one for Kate right now, along my index finger. For archery.”

He nods. Unerringly, he finds the gray and lavender compass rose on her shoulder blade (Jen); the winged dagger on the back of her neck (him and Foggy); and the chains inked on the inside of her left wrist, hidden beneath the cast (Eli). She doesn’t tell him that she’s planning another one, for Mike/Matt, for the devil. She doesn’t think it’s time to tell him that, yet. He lifts a hand to her cheek, and Darcy leans into it so he can touch each of her ear cuffs, the stud in her nose (she takes it out for official court things, but usually leaves it alone) and the gold streaks in her hair, which apparently still smell like bleach.

“I smell like bleach and ink?” Darcy wrinkles her nose. “Gross.”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I guess—that’s only part of what you smell like, smaller parts. There’s—”

He stops.

“Come on, Matthew,” says Darcy, and stretches. Her feet tangle in the cuffs of his pajama pants. “Tell me what I smell like.”

He Kermit-laughs, and Darcy hooks her foot around his ankle. For a long moment, Matt just breathes. Then he turns his face towards her, his eyes open. “Shampoo,” he says. “The one you used this morning, the honey stuff you left here ages ago. You have other types, but that one’s your favorite.”

It’s dumb, but that makes her heart squeeze. Darcy smiles, and chases it away in the next second, before he can echolocate it or whatever he does. Matt’s lips twitch up, though, so he’s probably already noticed. He doesn’t comment, though.

“Coffee, too. You always smell like coffee. I can usually tell if it’s a good day or a bad one by the type of roast.” He turns his hand, stroking the pulse point on her wrist with his forefinger, and takes another breath. “There’s soap from the bathroom at the office on your hands, still. Stuff from that churro, too, the one you stole from Foggy before Nobu—before. Cinnamon, sugar, flour, spice. Some of it’s still under your fingernails.” Automatically, she looks down at her fingers, but she can’t see anything there. Matt draws a third breath, mouth open, almost cat-like. “Your hand lotion, but that’s fainter. You haven’t used it in a day or two. The river. Laundry soap, from your clothes. Curry from the take-out place near the office. They added too much garam masala, substituted serrano peppers for the Thai chili they were supposed to use. Leftover make-up, make-up remover. Cigarette smoke, but that’s faint, you haven’t smoked since Stick. And your skin, and hair, just on their own.”

“My skin?”

He considers. “Warmth,” he says. “Salt, from sweat. And—I don’t know if it’s something you use, or just you, on your own, but you’re—it’s always a little sweet. It’s…” He gropes for a word. “Metal and bleach and coffee and ink and—and something sweet. Kind of like brown sugar, but not quite.” He opens his eyes, and strokes her cheek with his fingers. “That means Darcy, to me. That’s you.”

Darcy licks her lips. She swallows. Then she says: “That shouldn’t be hot. Why is that hot?”

“Because I’m hot like sriracha,” says Matt, and she finally just gives in. Darcy whacks him in the arm, and then pushes herself up so she can kiss him again, because yeah, okay, even if he said she smells like bleach, he’s also basically _memorized_ her in the weirdest possible way and she can’t help it, all right?

It takes a while before they get back to the original topic, which is boundaries and—whatchamawhosits. She hooks her chin onto Matt’s shoulder, right near one of the pinked-up scars from who-knows-what, and says, “We have to tell Foggy, Matt.”

Matt’s quiet for a long time. “I don’t think he’d appreciate hearing it, right now.”

“I’m not saying tell him right away.” She presses her lips to the skin of his shoulder. “Just like I’m not saying we should drag him out to a birthday party or whatever and pretend that nothing’s happened. But I’m not lying to him about this. He doesn’t deserve that, and we don’t, either. Even if it would be safer. Besides, he’d be—he’d be really hurt. Possibly more hurt than he is right now, and he had to actually _physically_ hold you together while I stitched you up.”

Matt hums, and hides his nose in her hair.

“Karen, too,” she says, thoughtfully. She’s falling asleep, and can’t quite keep her thoughts straight. “Though I wouldn’t be surprised if she figures it out the next time she sees us together. Because you’re so badat hiding things. Ow!”

He moves his fingers away from her hip, and smirks at her.

“You’re a prick,” she says. She wants to kiss him, and it takes her a moment to remember that she can. Darcy sets her lips to the pinkish scar in his shoulder, and then one of the older ones, a thin pale line against his skin. “Why do I like you when you’re such a prick?”

“Mostly because I’m very charming,” Matt says, and she snorts.

“All right, scruffy.” He smells like antiseptic and a bit like the East River, still, but now just mostly like Matt—like warmth, she realizes, and skin, and a hint of aftershave. She should probably feel guilty for being so happy, when Foggy’s hurting so badly and everything’s just going to shit, but she doesn’t. And she refuses to be ashamed of it. “I won’t even have to say anything to Jen. She’ll just know. Because she’s Jen. She might give you the shovel talk, though.”

“Been there, done that. Maybe four years ago.” Matt closes his eyes. “Rather not do it again.”

“Wait.” She lifts her head to look at him. “Jen read you the riot act _four years ago_?”

“I believe I have the right to remain silent, so I decline to answer the question.”

She’s going to kill Jen. “ _Four years ago_?”

“Fifth Amendment. You can’t make me talk,” Matt says, but he’s laughing. Darcy decides to ambush Jen about this at a later date—Jen, at least, tells her things—and subsides. Her eyelids are drooping, and even though she knows she’s going to wake up screaming with nightmares (it’s a tossup between Eli, Nobu, and dead Matt at the moment; her money’s on Nobu to be entirely honest) she can’t fight it off.

It’s probably because she’s so sleepy that she manages to say, “Realtalk, I have one major rule. If you ever lie to me about shit like this again, I’m gone.”

Matt stills. Then he turns his face towards hers.

“Not ever, Matt.” She sighs. “If I—I don’t even know what I’ll do or where I’ll go, but I’ll be gone. You ever get hurt and lie about it, you ever tell me you’re at home and go out to fight crime, you lie to me about _anything_ , and I’m gone. No exceptions, not even if you think it’ll keep me safer or—or whatever.” She draws a fingertip along the edge of the gauze she’d set over one of the slices from Nobu’s blade. “You promise me?”

He’s quiet for so long that she thinks she’s going to have to go and stay in Claire’s empty apartment. Then he nods, once. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. I promise.”

She doesn’t cry. She just kisses his shoulder one last time, and then closes her eyes. “Good,” says Darcy, and then lets herself drift. She’d be embarrassed about how quickly she falls asleep if not for the fact that she needs it so much. Besides, she’s pretty sure half the reason she passes out is because he keeps carding his fingers through her hair, and it’s stupidly soothing.

She thinks she feels a touch of lips against her scalp in the odd, fading moments right before she sleeps.

.

.

.

“Y’know, it’s probably a good thing you’re staying with your super-special masked friend right now, because if we had any more people in this apartment, we’d all probably kill each other.”

Darcy curls deeper into the corner of Matt’s couch, propping her phone between her ear and shoulder, and tries to scratch at the inside of her cast. Next to her, Matt drops his hand on her knee, and digs his fingernails in in warning. She stops. “What makes you think I’m staying with the mask?”

“Uh, because I know you? Please, Darcy.” Karen huffs. “Where else would you go right now? Especially considering everything with Fisk and the yakuza.”

“I am enacting my right to remain silent,” says Darcy, and Karen snorts. “Also, I love you guys, but yeah, I’m kind of glad about that too. How are things going over there?”

Karen lets out a gusty sigh that makes the phone static out for a second. “Mrs. Cardenas wants to go home. I can’t blame her, really. It’s her place, and we’ve all been fighting so hard for it. But until we’re sure that there aren’t gonna be more muggers trying to kill her, it can’t happen. We went back to get some of her things today, and half her neighbors have already taken the settlement. So yeah, it’s been a day and a half and everyone over here is already in a _fabulous_ mood.”

“God, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. I spend most of my time on the kitchen balcony-plank and going over the Goodman paperwork with Jen, so there’s something. I just feel really bad for Mrs. Cardenas, that’s all. All she wants is to go back home, and she can’t, so.”

Darcy still thinks it’s better than being dead, personally, but she doesn’t think she’s up to say that at the moment. “I’m just glad she’s okay.”

“Yeah, so am I. You really think they were trying to kill her?”

“Nobu wasn’t interested in her, exactly, and when I said I’d come quietly—” her throat sticks “—he left her alone, but like…I don’t think he was the one to pay off the mugger. The guy nearly pissed himself when Nobu and his friend showed up. He was scared of them. I don’t think he knew who they were.”

“So, what, you think someone’s going to try again?”

Darcy thinks of Wesley, of the angle to his mouth when he’d said _easier to take them both out._ He’d meant her and Matt, at the time, but… “I don’t know. Maybe. Until we’re sure she needs to stay out of sight. I’d ask Brett to help, but—”

She stops.

“But Fisk owns the police,” says Karen. “And most of the courts. And newspapers, and news stations, and probably half the goddamn podcasts I listen to on a daily basis. _Yes_ , Jen, I do think he owns a lot of the current New York City court system, that’s the whole point, that’s why we can’t tell anyone yet.”

Darcy hears Jen say something on the other end of the line, but it’s too muffled for her to make out. She recognizes the tone, though, the snippiness of it. She grimaces. “Sorry,” she says to Karen.

“It’s okay.” Karen’s quiet for a minute. Darcy turns so her back is propped up against the arm of the chair and her legs are tossed negligently over Matt’s lap. It’s nothing that they haven’t done since college, except Matt sets a hand on the bare skin just above her knee and draws little circles there with his forefinger. So yeah. Not exactly what they were doing in college. “I actually wanted to talk to you about something. Gimme a sec, I want to go outside.”

“About the court system?”

“No,” says Karen shortly. She hears the sliding door open, and then close again. “No, I—I think I found something out about Fisk. After—after I left you at the precinct yesterday, I went to the county clerk’s office, started going through old files. And I think I, um. I think I found something.”

Darcy pats at Matt’s shoulder, and then presses the phone closer to her ear. He tips his head to listen. “What do you mean, you found something?”

“I was looking through Births, Deaths, and Marriages—I wanted to see if I could find a death certificate for Fisk’s father, see if he really ran away like they said he did or if he died or whatever—and I found a marriage license for Fisk’s mother. Misfiled. One—one that was dated two years after she supposedly died.”

Darcy licks her lips. “Karen, are you saying that Fisk’s mother is _alive_?”

“I talked to her,” Karen says, all in a rush. Her words are tumbling over each other in her effort to get them out. “Me and Ben, we found her in this old nursing home upstate. Fisk’s biography online, it says he went out to stay with family in the country when he was twelve, after his father left—Darcy, his father didn’t leave, Fisk beat his dad to death with a hammer and his mother helped him hide the body. He killed his dad when he was twelve years old.”

“Holy shit.” Darcy squeezes her eyes shut. “What did Ben say?”

“He thinks it doesn’t help anything, that—that Fisk can spin it in a positive light, like he was a kid that was protecting his mom from getting the tar beaten out of her, and yeah, he can, but like—this is _something_ , Darcy. We found something that proves he’s not the altruistic Jesus Christ Superstar he’s pretending to be, and we can _use_ that.”

“Have you told anyone else this?”

“Other than Ben? I tried to call Foggy, but, uh. He’s not picking up. Josie called to tell me he spent most of the night there last night, so I think he’s—I don’t know. I think he’s getting blasted because he and Matt had a fight. I kind of found the sign in the trash.”

Matt’s hand goes still on her kneecap.

“Wait, sign?” Darcy blinks. “What sign?”

“…shit. It was supposed to be a surprise. Foggy went and had a sign made, for the firm. _Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis, Attorneys at Law._ I, uh. I found it in the trash when I went in to get some things, this morning. Do you know what they’re fighting about? Because Foggy won’t take my calls and Matt won’t tell me.”

 _Oh, Foggy._ “About—kind of about what happened to me. But also about some other stuff. Which they should tell you about themselves.”

Karen’s quiet for a moment. “Okay,” she says, not hurt, exactly, but…she sounds sore. “Yeah, okay. It’s—y’know. It’s probably private, and you guys have known each other for so long—”

“Stop that train of thought right now, get off, and send it back to the station.” Darcy sits up. “It has nothing to do with how long you’ve known us, honey. It’s Matt and Foggy’s argument. _I_ don’t even know the whole of it. They’re both notoriously closed-lipped about this shit, and until Foggy goes through his wash-rinse-repeat of drinking and bad decisions, I’m probably not going to hear a fucking word either. So it’s not you. Okay? It’s _not_ you.”

On the other end of the line, Karen draws a shaky breath. “Okay,” she says again, but it’s hopeful this time, instead of pained. “Okay.”

“Gimme one second.” She texts Foggy. ( _I know you probably don’t want to hear from me right now, but don’t take it out on Karen. It’s not fair._ ) “What are we going to do about Fisk? I assume you have a plan.” 

“I don’t, actually. That’s why I told you. Ben isn’t going to publish anything more about—about what’s going on. At least not right away. His wife is in the hospital and they’re—he said he needs to focus on her right now.”

Darcy, who’s never heard of any of this, closes her eyes. “Ben never mentioned that.”

“He doesn’t like talking about it.” Karen sighs. “God, I need a drink. But yeah, there’s that, and then we have Andromeda Fare. I talked to Brett while you were—well, after we found out you were okay, and he said that nobody ever looked into Andromeda that he knows of, but since it’s an old case it’s gonna be hard to get a warrant to investigate them. But he can try. I asked him to keep it quiet, just in case someone was keeping an eye out for it. I don’t think he believed me, but he agreed.”

Next to Darcy, Matt tips his head back to rest on the edge of the couch, and makes a pained sound.

“Good,” says Darcy, who is now _seriously_ considering just having that _No Catholic guilt allowed_ plaque made in triplicate (one for her and Jen’s place, one for Matt’s wall, and one for the office). In her hand, her phone buzzes with a text. “You’re being safe?”

“As safe as I can be when I’m really fucking pissed,” Karen snaps.

“Hey.” Darcy leans into the side of the couch, and checks the screen of her phone. (Foggy: _Matt’s the one I don’t want to hear from. I’m still not sure about you._ ) “He’s going to pay for what he’s done, Karen.”

“Yeah, because we’re going to be the ones to make him do it.” They both fall quiet for a moment. Then Karen clears her throat. “When are you coming back here?”

“I don’t know.” She swypes out a text. ( _Does that mean you’re up for talking?_ ) “I want to come back. I just—I don’t know if they’re going to come after me again, and I don’t think putting Mrs. Cardenas and me in the same room right now is a good idea. It’d be too tempting. Even with Fisk and his merry band of assholes in the hospital with food poisoning.” She switches the phone to her other ear. “You could have called me. I would have gone with you.”

“No, I know. I just—you had a hard day already. You needed the sleep.” She can almost see Karen shaking her head. “You should probably just go back to bed, honestly. That’s what you’d be doing if you were in the hospital like you were supposed to be.”

“You know how I sleep. Besides, it’s like—noon. It’s too bright outside for me to sleep right now.” Karen’s quiet for a moment. Darcy grits her teeth. “Karen, don’t go to Andromeda without me. Please? I’m not a complete invalid. Besides, I kind of want to be the one that tugs the thread that has all of Robbie Goodman’s assholery crashing down around his ears.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” Karen says, in a very satisfied voice. “I told Brett to call you the instant he gets the okay for the warrant.”

“You know me so well.” She stares at her splinted fingers again, and then looks at the screen of her phone when it vibrates. _One new message from: Kate Bishop._ “Hey, I have to go. I think Kate wants to talk to me about something. You can always call me, okay? No matter what.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Let me know if you find anything else. And be careful.”

“You too,” says Karen, and hangs up. Darcy settles her phone on her thighs and starts tapping through it with her good hand as Matt heaves an exasperated breath, squeezing his eyes shut.  

“Why does she let you tell her to be careful, but she gets mad if me or Foggy do it?”

Darcy pats at his shoulder again without looking. “Because you and Foggy are both straight white cisdudes with all the societal privileges contained therein. Don’t take it personally. Even if you both do still have a depressingly paternalistic protective streak, you’re vastly superior to the rest of your species.”

Matt grunts.

“She’s going to be careful, Matt,” Darcy says. “She agreed to the rules, same as the rest of us. If she needs help, she’ll call me. Okay?”

Matt doesn’t say anything. Darcy looks up from her phone (Kate: _Have some stuff translated, think u should c_ ) and then sets it aside. “Hey,” she says, swinging her legs down to the ground again. She rests her fingers to his cheek, turns his face towards hers. “Hey. She can do this. She’s smart, and resourceful, and a hell of a lot stronger than I think you or Foggy have actually realized. Don’t worry about Karen.”

He closes his eyes, and breathes in. Then he holds it, just for a moment. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Darcy says, and feathers a kiss on his mouth. He tastes like coffee (which he really shouldn’t be drinking right now), black with a bit of sugar. She loves how he always takes a little breath when she kisses him, like he’s surprised, or like he’s trying memorize the scent of her. His hand comes up, knuckles brushing the underside of her chin, and he leans forward, tugging lightly at her lower lip.

She feels him wince before she realizes what’s even happened, and Darcy leans back. “What?”

“Popped a stitch.” He shakes his head. “It’s fine. I can fix it.”

“Lay back down, you idiot,” she says, fondly, and gets up off the couch. His hand slips off her wrist. “I know I’m an awesome kisser but I don’t think I’ve ever managed to get someone hot and bothered enough to pop a _stitch_.”

“You’re hilarious,” says Matt. His voice echoes oddly down the hallway. “Your phone is buzzing again.”

“It’s probably Kate. She wants me to look at something she found in the photos I gave her.” Darcy grabs the first aid kit from under the bathroom sink, and returns to the living room to find Matt gingerly peeling his shirt off and lying back on the couch. There’s a series of red spots along the wide strip of gauze and tape that she’d had to use to cover up the worst of the wounds Nobu had left behind, and she curses her broken hand. “You’re gonna have to help me a little, I can’t hold the wound closed and fix the stitches at the same time.”

“I can do that, at least.”

Darcy finagles a glove onto her hand (it takes longer than she wants to admit) and then peels back the gauze. The wound looks about as bad as she remembers it being: almost the length of her hand, crooked on one side where the hooked blade had ripped out, angled viciously over the worst possible places. It could have been very much worse, but to be frank, it’s pretty damn bad right at the moment. It’s not swelling, though, and it’s not red (well, not _flaming_ red, which she’s pretty sure means infection) so she’ll take it. She opens the first aid kit with her good hand, picking through it for the seam needle. Matt has to be the one to thread it (which he somehow does flawlessly, and on the first fucking try) so Darcy tugs her phone back over to herself and swypes out _I can come over in an hour?_ before taking the needle back and wiping it down with a cleansing rag thing in one of those little packets. (She doesn’t know what things are called, okay, she just knows how to use them.)

Thankfully, he’s only managed to undo two stitches, instead of all of them. She still hates that she has to fix him again, though. He doesn’t even twitch as she hooks the needle into him, just keeps his face tipped up towards the ceiling and breathes.

“Kate has something she wants to show me.” She finishes the first stitch, and lets out a slow sigh. “I’d say you’re not allowed to come, but I’m pretty sure you’ll just wander off somewhere and get your ass kicked if I don’t keep an eye on you, so.”

“You have so much faith in me,” says Matt dryly. Darcy finishes the second stitch, and then frowns at the wound before knotting the thing off.

“Yeah, well, you seem to have a talent for heroic idiocy.” She clips the end of the thread, and sets the whole thing aside. “While I have you pinned, I actually wanted to talk to you about something.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“Please. You love listening to me talk.” She tears a piece of tape off with her teeth, and presses the first piece of gauze down as gingerly as she can over the wound. It’s only once that’s done, and the first side is taped, that she says, “Are you going to tell Karen the truth about the man in the mask?”

Matt hisses, long and low. “I haven’t thought about it.”

“Bullshit,” she says through the next bit of tape. “You’ve totally thought about it. You just don’t want to talk about it.” 

He scoffs. It’s only once the second and third bits of tape are in place that he says, “I’ll consider it.”

“You’d better mean that.” She tapes the last side down, and then throws the roll back into the kit. “She deserves to know, same as the rest of us. And she’s smart enough to figure it out on her own, without you telling her. Especially if we have to keep coming up with shitty excuses like _I was hit by a car_.”

“Yeah, well.” He eases himself up to something approximating a sitting position, and lets out a squashed little noise when he thinks she’s not paying attention. “It’s conceivable.”

“About as conceivable as you falling down the stairs and actually breaking through the floor, which, y’know, is a thing that we said yesterday. Because _that_ totally works when you’re not being tossed around like a chew toy.”

“Technically it did break because someone fell on it.”

“Whatever you say,” she says, and pats his cheek. Matt catches her hand before she can pull away, and sets his lips to the inside of her wrist. A pleasant sort of heat winds its way through her skin. She scrapes her fingernails lightly over the scruff on his cheek, and then sighs. “No,” she says, flatly.

The corners of his mouth lift. “No?”

“You have stitches,” she says. “Lots of them. Some of which I just fixed because apparently you can’t keep still long enough to let them do their job. So don’t you make that face at me.”

“What face?” he says, his eyebrows lifting.

“You know exactly what face.” She considers, just for a moment. Then she brushes the backs of her fingers down the line of his jaw, and kisses him, resting her hand on his shoulder to keep him from shifting too much. Matt reaches up, pressing his palm flat to the back of her neck, over the feathered dagger. She’s panting a little when she finally tugs back, and eases her lips over his one more time before saying, “That face.”

“I make a face like that?”

“You clearly have not seen the faces you make.”

Matt grins. She can feel it against her mouth. “Huh.”

“Don’t be smug. It’s insufferable.” She presses her lips to his forehead, and slides forward until her knees are knocking into the edge of the sofa, tugging her fingers through his hair. “Let Foggy think, okay? You know how he works, same as I do. He gets angry, and then he gets sad, and then he thinks. He’s not through the angry bit, yet, and it’ll probably take a while. He didn’t have tragic childhood issues to help him understand faster.”

“Not helping,” Matt says, but he relaxes anyway. She sighs.

“There’s—something else. I was thinking about it last night. I think—I think I need to learn how to fight. And I want you to teach me.”

For a long time, he doesn’t say anything at all. He lifts one hand, hooking his thumb into the waistband of her borrowed pajama pants, tracing a circle on the small of her back with his index finger. Then he says, “Okay.”

“I—seriously?”

“I don’t know if I can teach you what I can do, but yeah. Okay.” He tips his head forward, resting his forehead against her stomach. “Let me heal a little, first. I don’t think trying to show you how to punch right now is a very good idea.”

“I also have a broken wrist, so there’s that.” She hooks her fingers into his hair again. “I’m not—I’m not asking to become another badass vigilante. I just—I want to know how to put a guy on the ground, and know he’s not going to get back up. That’s what I want to learn.”

He’s quiet. “I’m not a very good teacher. You’ll probably want to yell at me.”

“You say that like it’s news.” She kisses the top of his head. “I don’t want to be a victim anymore, Matt. I’m done with it. I’m not going to stop, but I’m not going to let them hurt me. Not anymore. And I know you’ll always come for me, but I want to be able to help you, too. More than—more than I did with Nobu. And I want to be able to help myself. ”

His arms hitch around her waist. Then Matt sighs, and nods once. “Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

“So we’re good?”

“We’re good.”

She strokes her fingers down the back of his neck for a few minutes. Then she checks her phone one last time (Foggy: _Josie’s, 9pm._ ) and shoves it into her sweatpants pocket. “I have to go change. We need to go talk to Kate. Are you sure you’re up for this?”

“Come on,” Matt says, and then winces. “It can’t possibly be that bad.”

.

.

.

Brigid O’Reilly is a short, muscular woman in her late twenties, her hair cut close to her head and her sleeves rolled up. She’s taken off her prosthesis, letting it rest on the couch, and she’s been scratching at the base of what’s left of her arm; it’s red around the elbow. Seeing her next to Kate is like looking at a knight defending a princess, or an itty-bitty Brienne of Tarth watching over an Asian Sansa Stark (if _Game of Thrones_ ever actually gets there, which she honestly doubts, at this point; thanks, Ramsay). Darcy’s not sure if seeing them together in the same room is heartening or terrifying, and she gives Kate a long, careful look before saying, “Well, hey there, stranger.”

“Hey,” O’Reilly says. Her voice always startles Darcy, husky and cracking from too many cigarettes. She sounds about thirty years older than she actually is. O’Reilly gives Matt one top-to-toe look (he’s doing an admirable job of looking normal and uninjured when he just stands still, though Darcy can still read lines of pain around his mouth), and then dismisses him as irrelevant, because to O’Reilly, he kind of is. She jerks her chin up at Darcy. “You look like crap. You go to the hospital?”

Darcy flashes her cast. “I’ll be fine. Kate, what’d you find?”

“I invited Brigid to come and help,” says Kate, in the sort of voice that says _I’m waiting for you to blow up and you haven’t yet and it’s worrying me._ “She can’t speak Japanese, but I gave her things to organize. And she knows more about the yakuza than me, anyway.”

“Awesome.” Darcy eyes O’Reilly again. “You’re not gonna get in trouble for this?”

“I don’t give a shit if I get in trouble with Oslo,” says O’Reilly, and _this_ is why she likes Brigid O’Reilly.  “Oslo’s a dick. Who’s this?”

“This is Matt.” Darcy glances at Matt over her shoulder. “He’s my partner. I don’t think you guys have met, actually—Kate Bishop, Officer Brigid O’Reilly, Matt Murdock.”

Kate stands, wiping sweat off her palm, and shakes the hand Matt puts out. She frowns a little, her eyes flat and suspicious. “You have some calluses there, dude.”

“I can still lift if someone spots me,” says Matt, and curls his fingers around the handle to his cane. Kate darts an odd look at Darcy, but shrugs, and turns back to her spread of photographs.

Kate’s apartment is a high-rise penthouse on the edge of Central Park, stupidly sprawling and full of modern art. Darcy has always had the feeling, considering how many hats and coats are draped over kinetic statues, that Kate doesn’t like the décor very much. One of the mirrors hanging on the wall is shattered, the pieces missing from the frame. They’ve pushed the black leather couches (and seriously, what is it with rich people and leather couches) back up against the wall, and laid the photocopied pictures out in a series of concentric rings on the floor. Darcy hooks her hand into Matt’s elbow and says, “Take off your shoes,” before kicking her own heels off and picking her way through the debris. “So, you said you found something?”

“I’ve been looking at these for a while.” Kate drops down into the center of the rings next to Yoko, crossing her legs. Yoko’s in her early fifties, her hair just starting to gray. When Darcy crouches down next to her, she dips her head and smiles, but lets Kate talk. Yoko has very little English. “Mostly if you look at them they’re just—y’know, territory markers. Things you’d paint on walls to let other gangs know you’re wandering into your territory, that kind of shit.” She chews on her tattered thumbnail. Her cuticles are scabbed over. “Those ones were pretty easy to pick out, so we set those in the outside ring. It’s an asteroid field, sort of. It’s mostly just a bunch of junk that makes intergalactic travel difficult.”

Darcy catches Kate’s hand, and draws it away from her mouth. Kate doesn’t seem to notice. “We’re using space metaphors, now?”

“She hasn’t slept in two days,” O’Reilly grunts. “There’s been a hell of a lot more than space metaphors going on in here. She was playing the Imperial March on repeat for seven straight hours before I took the iPod away.”

Okay, now she’s worried. “Kate.”

“I’m fine.” Kate twitches, as if she’s shaking off a fly. “I’ve gone longer without sleep. Anyway, outer ring planets are photocopies of papers that have been found at different crime scenes that are known to have a yakuza background.” She makes a face when Darcy jumps. “Come on, it’s not that hard to figure out that’s what you’re looking into, especially if you’re talking Goodman-Okamura. Some of the guys my dad has met with from them have always been super sketchy, and it wouldn’t surprise me at this point if they actually also turn out to be demons and/or some sort of bloodthirsty alien, but whatever.” She takes a deep breath. “Some of it is just shipping manifests, y’know, probably with a bunch of code-words since the yakuza do a lot of human trafficking in and out of the city, according to Brigid. I’m pretty sure _Okinawan pineapples_ are actually sex slaves, but that’s neither here nor there.”

 _Pineapples,_ Matt mouths, and Darcy doesn’t respond. He looks rather like he’s just been knocked over the head with a tree stump. Considering it’s the first time he’s experienced either Kate or O’Reilly, and he’s getting a double-dose with the pair of them in the same room, she’s not particularly surprised about it. Amused, maybe, but not surprised.

“Most of it isn’t really connected to Goodman-Okamura,” Kate says, “they’re never mentioned by name, but there are a few meteors—” she points at the pages in between the concentric rings, marked up with highlighter “—that talk about boats and trains and planes and shit that have American IDs, affiliated with companies that Goodman-Okamura have contracts with, or shell corporations that GO bought up later, and have turned into other companies, under different names. So there’s those.”

Just like Union Allied. “Holy shit, Kate.”

“Yoko found those,” Kate says, and Yoko ducks her head with a shy smile. Darcy’s never quite been sure where Yoko came from, but she looks similar enough to Kate that they could be mother and daughter. Or, she realizes, aunt and niece. “I didn’t recognize any of the kanji, so I had her look at them, and then she found the rest through going through every single page. I found most of these, though,” she added, leaning forward and touching the second-closest ring. “More papers, but these ones have names that you can Google. A lot of the people in them are in jail or dead, but if you could get the DA to look into it I’m sure they’d be able to scrounge up at least a few people who’d swear to the involvement of Goodman-Okamura. They’re high enough in the network of the gang to know about that sort of thing.”

“Jury wouldn’t like it, but whatever, they can suck my dick.” Darcy knocks Kate in the shoulder. “How many names did you find?”

“Thirty, thirty-five of people that are still alive.” Kate tugs a file out from under her ass, and displays it with a flourish. “And _this_ is our sun, the clincher, that big-ass ball of gas and awesome that gives the whole system life—”

Darcy has the strangest feeling that she’s listening to herself talk, and it’s kind of amazing.

“— _this_ ,” says Kate, and she opens the file to display three photos. It’s a series of shots of a dead body, a Russian gangster judging by the Cyrillic tattooed across the man’s knuckles and around his throat. There’s a shot from above, showing how half his head has been taken off in a shotgun blast, and then one from either side. Yoko makes a faintly distressed sound and looks away, but Kate lifts the first photo, and throws the file aside. There’s kanji inked in blood next to the body, a gauchely gory signature that Darcy hadn’t been able to make heads nor tails of.

“This is the docks murder,” she says, and still lurking on the edge of Kate’s solar system, Matt says, “Ah.”

“This,” Kate says, tapping at the kanji with her one unmangled fingernail, “says _te wo makenai_ , which literally means the hand will not lose, or does not lose, something along those lines. It varies with context and it’s probably in code anyway. But the interesting part is here.” She sets the first photo on the white carpet, and rests the tip of her finger against the series of boxes on the right-hand side in the second frame. “These are shipping crates. The men who were killed were known to have been boosting shipments of yakuza drugs back in 2011 and 2012, and the popular theory with the police—” She stops. “Bridge, you said it nicely.”

 _Bridge_? Darcy thinks, but presses her lips tight together and says nothing.

“Shots fired over the prow,” says O’Reilly, grimly pleased. “Letting the Ranskahov brothers that their forays into yakuza territory weren’t appreciated. Vlad and Anatoly must have received the message, ‘cause they backed off sharpish.”

“And the Russians didn’t retaliate?”

“Nope.” O’Reilly’s lips pop on the P. “Not that we could tell.”

She’s tempted to ask how O’Reilly (who worked the Central Park Precinct) knows about theories from the 15th, but she’s a little scared to ask O’Reilly how she does anything, to be honest. She’s so terrifyingly competent that it gives Darcy hives.

“So this was in 2012,” says Darcy. The same year that she and Mike/Matt had theorized that the Japanese and Russians had made a truce under Wilson Fisk.

“Shots fired,” Kate repeats, and then grabs an empty glass from the coffee table. “But if you look, here—” She sets the glass over the top of the photo, and gestures at Darcy. “The crates are unmarked, but if you look close you can see the product that was being loaded into them. Not the drugs, the drugs are obvious, but these.”

They’re tennis balls. _Oh, the wily, wily ways of drug dealers._ Boxes and boxes and boxes of tennis balls, in neat little crates shaped kind of like egg cartons. The sides are emblazoned with an oddly angular W which Darcy doesn’t recognize. “That,” says Kate, “is the logo of Wexler Sports Equipment, which was dissolved in 2007. All of its unused stock was bought up in a high-ranking auction, ticketed only, the sort of place that people drop millions on utter bullshit. My dad attended,” she adds, and clambers to her feet again to grab a notebook off the couch. “He takes notes about everything everyone buys, so he can figure out when to mess with it later. And Wexler Sports Equipment, complete with all their balls, was purchased by—”

“—Goodman-Okamura,” says Darcy.

“Most of the records of the sale went missing in a _mysterious_ warehouse fire, but like I said. My dad’s a snoopy bastard. I’m pretty sure he had the whole day recorded, because he’s anal as fuck. There should be records somewhere in Goodman and Okamura about the purchase, too, at least to show the chunk of change they dropped to get Wexler’s logo. And then there are the Wexlers, who have decamped to Bermuda since then, but, y’know. Skype is a thing. You can see it better in this picture,” says Kate, slapping the third photo down, and sure enough there’s three boxes, their logos blood-spattered and jarred but there. They’re small—just small enough that you need to peer in order to see them—but they’re there, and they’re clear, and Darcy’s just lost all her breath. “They’re not unloading the drugs, they’re _loading_ them—there was a packaging line in a different part of the warehouse, so these were shipments that were going to be wrapped in paper and then covered with spare sports stuff and then sent to who the hell knows where, but Darcy, _look_.” She points at the logo. “It’s them. It’s _them._ ”

Darcy looks at Kate, and then Kate looks at Darcy. There are deep rings under her eyes, something twisting under the skin. It looks almost like vengeance. Darcy can’t help it. She wraps both her arms tight around Kate, and holds on.

“You did it,” she says, and Kate relaxes into her, slipping her arms around Darcy very, very slowly, as if she’s scared to break her. “You badass queen, you did it.”

“It’s not Rich Goodman in prison, but it’s something.” Kate pulls back. A smile flickers across her face. “We have them by the balls.”

“Don’t ever make that joke again,” says Darcy. “That was terrible. I should sue you for lack of humor.”

Kate flaps a hand. There’s something broken in the set of her mouth. “Pshhhh.”

“So the Japanese get the drugs from the Russians, who get it from the Triad, cut it, and sell it for more money,” Darcy says. “Since the yakuza are affiliated with Goodman-Okamura, Rich Goodman gets free cuts, which he then sells to his buddies. The company itself works in shipping drugs to wherever they have holdings, which is a lot of Indonesia and other parts of southeast Asia. Not to mention the pineapples. I’ll bet that the women the Russians were kidnapping out of the city were being shipped through Goodman-Okamura containers. Or Confederated Global.”

“That’s enough for reasonable doubt,” says O’Reilly, and when Darcy darts a look at Matt, he has his chin resting on the top of his cane and a smile twitching at his lips. “And, on top of the photos of Robbie Goodman and Hironobu Orihara together—which I _know_ still exist, because I saw them yesterday afternoon in evidence—it’s definitely enough to get a judge to put out a warrant for the investigation of Goodman-Okamura. Girly did good.”

Kate blushes. Darcy hugs her again, hard, and then drags her up from the floor to do a little dance. Yoko laughs, clapping her hands a little.

“We give it to the DA,” she says, pulling back. “I—my sister’s a part of the DA, she’ll be more than willing to look over all of this, make sure we have ground to stand on—and Brett will look into it, all of this evidence came from the 15th and we know for a fact he’s not dirty—this could actually _happen._ ” She might actually cry. Holy shit. “Oh my _god._ Kate, you solved it. I’m _so proud of you_.”

“I didn’t really do much. It was mostly Yoko and Brigid, they showed me where to look and gave me the background and stuff.” Kate rocks back and forth, still staring at the photos. “Robbie Goodman used the money from his drug trafficking to pay men to bully the women his son raped into not testifying. We take that away, we get to Rich.”

“They’re both going down.” She dabs at her eyes. “They’re _all_ going down. Matt, could you—um, could you call Jen? And tell her about this stuff? I just—”

Matt jumps. “Yeah. Sure. Um.”

Brigid heaves herself to her feet. “Private room’s this way,” she says, and leads Matt off. It’s so weird to see it happen, now that she knows that Matt can probably recite the entirety of the apartment if he tried, but it happens, and Darcy manages not to comment on it. Kate stands in her solar system of papers, the smile fading from around her eyes, and Darcy sighs.

“Okay,” she says. “I love what you’ve done, I really, really do. But I thought you were more interested in making Rich sweat, not Robbie.” She stops. “Bad phrasing, but whatever. I know I asked you to help me, but I was thinking more, y’know. Checking over characters, not…this. What brought this on?”

Kate bites her lip. “You mind if your friend has to wait around up here for a bit? I want to show you something.”

“Uh.” Darcy glances down the hall, then at her watch (two o’clock; she has more than enough time to talk to Matt about meeting up with Foggy, and to get to Josie’s afterwards) and then stands. “Yeah. We have time.”

“My archery range,” says Kate. “Come on.”

They don’t put their shoes back on. Kate leads the way down a short hallway to a shining chrome door, which turns out to be the entrance to an elevator. There’s only one button inside, labeled _B_ , and Kate pushes it with her thumb.

Kate’s dad must have shelled out a lot of money to convert the basement of a high-end penthouse building like this into a private archery range for his daughter. It’s as long as the building is wide, targets painted into the wall—or into a false wall, since she’s pretty sure the walls down here are made of granite and can’t be pierced—like splashes of blood. Kate goes to a cabinet near the door, spinning the padlock this way and that before kicking it open. There are four bows inside, some recurve, some longbow, all of them very expensive-looking. She takes one out, and tests the pull. “There aren’t cameras down here,” Kate says after a moment. Darcy startles, and glances up at the ceiling. “My dad keeps the apartment under surveillance in case someone gets in. At least, that’s what I tell myself. The alternative is he’s keeping an eye on me from Manila, and I’d rather not think about that.”

Darcy sits in a folding chair near the wall, watching as Kate draws the bowstring back to her ear, holds for a moment, and then relaxes it. “Your dad’s a douchebag.”

Kate grabs a handful of arrows from inside the cabinet, and then an actual honest-to-god quiver, which she slings over her shoulder.

“We knew that already though,” Darcy adds. “What’s up?”

Kate nocks an arrow. She takes a breath, and then in one fluid motion, raises the bow, draws the string back to her ear, blows her hair out of her face, and releases. It hits the bull’s eye with a loud _thunk_ , and Kate lowers the bow again. Her forehead creases. “Shit. I’m off.”

Darcy shades her eyes. “Looks fine from here.”

“It’s half an inch too far left,” Kate grunts, and takes another arrow from the holder. Breath, raise, draw, release, and this time when the arrow lands she nods once, sharply, as if she’s satisfied. She turns her head, just a little. “There’s a bucket of tennis balls under that chair. Do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Throw them for me? I want to try something.”

Darcy blinks. She blinks again. Then she grabs a handful of tennis balls, tucking them into her sling for safekeeping. Kate gestures her out into the main body of the range, cocking her head just to the side when Darcy obeys her without a word. She draws another arrow. “Throw them away from you,” she says. “I won’t hit you. But throw them hard, if you’re worried.”

“Kate.”

“Just do it, okay?” There’s something odd in Kate’s face, something pleading. “Just throw them. Please?”

Darcy rubs her thumb over the first tennis ball. Then she throws it hard against the floor, so it bounces as high as her head, higher. There’s a _whish_ , and a thunk, and then a tennis ball has been pinned to the wall between two of the targets, the feathers on the arrow still shuddering as if they’re caught in flight. Kate draws another arrow. “Again.”

Darcy’s just thrown her fifth tennis ball (behind her and to the right, and in less than a second it’s stuck, quivering, to the floor) when Kate says, “Robbie Goodman. He’s part of it, isn’t he?”

Darcy throws two balls at once, straight up in the air. Kate moves like lightning, draw, release, draw, release, and the balls are pinned to the ceiling. “What do you mean?”

“The Goodmans.” Her voice cracks. “Both of them—I’m not stupid, Darcy, I can put a few things together. Ben’s article on Union Allied, Karen Page, the dead yakuza man in that warehouse on the water. You getting kidnapped, the cops fucking up my case. That guy who was with the Goodmans, that day we met them—he was in that article with Wilson Fisk. That’s why you’re looking into this. There’s something more going on here, and whatever it is, Robbie Goodman and—and Rich are both a part of it. Aren’t they?”

Oh, god. “Kate.”

“It’s because of him, isn’t it?” Kate says, and draws another arrow. Darcy grabs a tennis ball, and throws it blindly somewhere to the right. It sticks to the floor with a popping sound, a syringe plugged into an IV drip. “That guy, Fisk. He’s running all of it, isn’t he? He works with the yakuza, and with the Goodmans, and—and the Triad and the Russians and all of it. And you’re trying to stop him, and that’s why—that’s why they hurt you. And it looks like they hurt your friend, too. I can see it, how he stands. Like he’s had someone hold him down and hit him.”

Not exactly what happened, but it’s close enough to work. And honestly, it’s probably a better excuse than _Matt was hit by a car_ than anything else. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s—they hurt both of us.”

Kate fires another arrow. It comes so close to Darcy that she can feel the air move as it passes, but it pins another tennis ball to the wall. Darcy doesn’t move. “Was what happened to me a part of it, too?” she asks, in a voice like a blade whittled too thin. “Did—did Fisk organize it to get my dad to do something? Was it a _punishment_? Did—did Robbie Goodman have his son rape me to—”

“Kate, no.” Darcy steps away from the range, stopping a foot from her, not wanting to touch her without her permission, but wanting so desperately to hug her. “No, honey. No. I wish I could—I wish I could blame it on Fisk, what happened to you, but Rich Goodman is a sick sadistic fuck, and it had nothing to do with that.”

“It just happened, then,” Kate says, and lowers her bow. Her eyes are shining, and her cheeks are wet. “It just _happened_. There wasn’t any meaning in it, it wasn’t—it wasn’t for a reason, it just—”

She drops her bow in the same moment Darcy steps forward, and hugs her hard. Kate screams, hiding her face in Darcy’s shoulder and wailing _._ Darcy’s heard of people screaming like banshees, but Kate actually _does_ it, like she can kill with her voice. Like she’s heralding death. She’s not sure which of them hit the floor first, but she lets Kate crawl into her lap, her nails digging into Darcy’s shoulder and the muscles in her shoulders torqueing from how stiff she’s holding herself, heavy with the weight of this thing she’s carrying. Darcy hums quietly, and tugs her fingers through Kate’s hair, letting her cry. She has no idea how long she sits there, an hour, maybe, two, but it feels like forever before Kate finally stills. Darcy rocks her, and Kate lets her.

“We have enough,” Darcy says. Her voice is hoarse. “We have enough to get them, now. We can do it. We have enough.”

Kate’s quiet. Then, agonizingly slowly, she pulls back. Her eyes are red, her make-up smeared. The sharp bones of her face are cast in shadow. Her pelvis is jamming uncomfortably into Darcy’s leg, but Darcy doesn’t move. She just tips her head forward, resting her forehead to Kate’s temple. Kate lets out a shaky breath, and then shifts so she can lean against Darcy’s shoulder without squashing her. There’s a pair of leggings draped over the back of the nearest bench, for some reason. Darcy watches them for a while, just petting Kate’s hair and breathing quietly, because she’s pretty sure that’s all she can do.

“Yeah,” Kate says. The word cracks. “Maybe.”

She’s staring at the tennis balls like they’re bodies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: A little bit of Gao, a little bit of Fisk, a little bit of Elena, and a lot of Foggy.
> 
> Whichever of you offered Spanish help, send me an email! I have some Elena to translate. totallynotashoe@gmail.com


	15. Do Unto Others

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for: Racist mentalities/language, homophobic language, and some misogynist language (all thanks to Leland; we love you, dude). 
> 
> Spanish translations at the bottom! So many thank yous to the lovely missingending, who translated for me and kept me from being dumb. /smooches/ Any errors, accents or otherwise, are mine. 
> 
> And now the short rest between dramas is officially at an end. I had an excellent birthday yesterday (saw _Jurassic World_ and had SO MUCH FUN OH MY GOD) and we can get back to the every-other-day posting schedule. (Holy shit I'm insane.) I'm two chapters ahead of you (almost three) and I'm about halfway through "The Ones We Leave Behind" at this point, SO. That should give you a decent idea of how many we have left.

He finds her sitting in an empty room in the Museum of Natural History, because apparently that’s where all the fossils live. Leland tugs at the edges of his jacket, wondering if it’s going to snow tonight or what. It’s early for snow, only partway through October, but there’s a bite to the air that can only be explained by frost and ice and frozen rain. The city always looks different covered in snow. It’s like a layer of purity, something that gets trampled underfoot and through the muck and into slush.

He thinks there’s a metaphor somewhere in there, but he doesn’t really want to pursue it. He doesn’t have the time.

Gao looks exactly like she always does, kitted out in her weird jacket and her long skirt and her hair in a neat bun at the back of her head. She keeps her eyes closed, and something in him thinks that she’s been listening for him even though he’s given her no warning for this meeting, set up no appointment. There are two Chinese guys stationed on either door, like security for a queen. One of them stops him with a hand on his chest (rude little shit, but there’s a gleaming gun underneath his suit jacket, so Leland doesn’t protest too loudly) and says something in Chinese that he can’t make out. It must be a question, though, because Gao inclines her head once, and he’s allowed to pass. Leland fixes his coat.

“Jackass,” he says, and the Chinese man’s eyes narrow. So that one speaks English, then. The rest of them don’t react at all. “It’s been a shitty enough night without your men harassing me, Gao. Wesley’s jumped the fucking boat and that damn woman is still alive. Jesus, being near the man is like watching someone skewer a beached whale. It’s pathetic and uncomfortable and I don’t like it.”

Gao says nothing. She does, however, pat the bench next to her. Leland’s knees creak as he sits. It’s been twenty years since he’s done anything similar to training, but he’s not in bad shape for a man his age, even if arthritis is starting to catch up with him. “Well?” he snaps at the man who speaks English. “Are you gonna translate, or what? We don’t have all damn night.”

Gao says something in Chinese. He hates the language, really. He hates Japanese, too, but there’s something about Chinese that gets on his nerves. There’s odd dips and curves that he can’t predict, not like English. Consonants squashed together where they shouldn’t be. He hates the old bat for it, though he knows it’s illogical. Lee calls him racist, and he supposes that he is, but come on: when did American crime get dropped into the hands of the foreigners? What happened to good, old-fashioned gangsters? He wants Al Capone back, not this melting pot shit. “She says that you have to be more patient,” the jackass parrots, and folds his hands behind his back like Wesley does. “The poison can be crippling, even if one seems to improve upon first treatment.”

“That’s not the point of it and you know it,” he snaps at Gao. For a second, he’d give anything to slap that stupid serenity off her face. She’s like a character in a fucking movie. The zen sensei, or sifu, or whatever the hell they’re called. He wants to see her angry. He wants to see her burn like Nobu, if only to make her react to something. Anything at all. “If he finds out it was us—”

“He will not find out,” the jackass translates. Gao opens her eyes and turns to him, her mouth turning up at the edges. “In moments of crisis Mr. Fisk is unable to think beyond himself. Unless you tell him, he won’t know.”

“Tell him.” Leland snorts. “Like hell. I like my head where it _is_ , thank you. ‘course, it wouldn’t matter if he jumped off a goddamn bridge, the way you people keep carrying on. Is it some sort of thing for Chinese to just—keep going? I thought that was the Brits. _Keep calm and carry on._ ”

The jackass’s mouth goes thin. Gao ignores the question. “What do you mean, Wesley has vanished?”

Leland waits until the jackass translates, and then says, “One of my boys is a bodyguard for him, tonight. Fisk, not Wesley. Said Wesley went rambling off somewhere because _apparently_ there are better things for him to be doing than waiting for Sleeping Beauty to hurry up and die already.” He tugs at his collar. “Which, y’know, is true for all of us. I’ve had it up to here with this romantic subplot bullshit. Should’ve just hired a sniper. Picked the right moment. Boom, bullet in the head, lots of mess, no problem.”

Her smile widens. He still can’t see any of her teeth.

“She says, what about the mask? Any movement?”

“Much as I’d like to think the bastard’s dead, we’re not that lucky.” He pulls on his collar again. _Fuckin’ creepy-ass old hag._ “Nobu managed to land a good one on him, or so Francis says. Could be he crawled into a hole and he’s rotting somewhere, which’d make my life a hell of a lot easier. Though he’s a convenient scapegoat, if I have to say it.” Leland sighs through his nose. “I hate having to say things. I’m only here for the damn numbers. I don’t know when I managed to get caught up with Russians that have their heads chopped off in car doors and Japanese ninjas that—that see sound and hear color and catch themselves set on fire. And you,” he adds, a little accusing, and though jackass bristles all over again, Gao just sits and watches him, like a weasel peering out from under a rock. “Because you scare me.”

Gao smiles again, and says something else.

“She says you have nothing to be afraid of,” says the jackass, “so long as you don’t bother her.”

“Crouching tiger, hidden vampire,” Leland mutters under his breath. He thinks, for a moment, he sees a flicker of motion around Gao’s eyes, but then it’s gone. Maybe he imagined it. “So yeah. I’ve delivered the message, done what I was supposed to do before Wesley decided to fuck off, wherever the hell he is.” Maybe he went off to cry in a corner that Fisk has such a devoted lady love. He wouldn’t put it past the two-faced little shit.

“Madame Gao asks if you have heard anything of the woman Nobu was pursuing.”

Leland rolls his eyes. “Jesus, do all of you have a major boner for this woman? Are we in middle school? The way Wesley talks about her it’s like he thinks the sun shines out of her ass or something, and I always thought he was Fisk’s special shower friend. He moons e-damn-nough to be one, anyway.”

Gao just stares at him, and waits. She looks like she’s imagining pulling a knife from under her skirt and flaying him alive with it. _I am in armor,_ he tells himself, but body armor can’t do a damn thing against creepy, staring eyes. “No, I don’t know a goddamn thing about the lawyer woman. She’s pointless. Now that Nobu’s dead, there’s nothing she could really do to us.”

“Madame Gao has heard otherwise.” The bodyguard touches a hand to his ear, as if he’s listening to something. “Goodman is a loose end. There have been policemen sniffing around the travel agency. We’ve managed to offset them for the moment, but if the woman persists in pursuing the case against the Goodmans, then Madame Gao’s product may be compromised. Not to mention the fact that the Japanese still do not have the block they desire. They will lose their tempers sooner rather than later, and with the Vanessa woman near death and Wesley AWOL, Wilson Fisk is not equipped to handle the fallout. This cannot be allowed to happen.”

“No shit that can’t happen, kid,” Leland snaps at the bodyguard. He knows for a fact that the damn squint-eyed bastard wants to hit him. _Good_. _Just try it, snot-nosed immigrant fucker._ “We can turn Fisk and the Japanese on each other if we have to, let them duke it out and side with the winner. The lawyer girl, I’m not dealing with her. Bitch hasn’t come near me, yet, and I’m not gonna draw her attention if I can help it. Plus: your product? That’s your problem, Gao, not mine. I just shuffle the numbers.”

“Madame Gao is aware.” She inclines her head, as if he’s just paid her a compliment. Fucking Asians. “She asks if you have any intention of looking for James Wesley.”

“Why the hell should I? He’s a big boy, he can handle himself. Whatever the hell he has the scent of, best that he be left alone. What with Fisk pulling a damsel-in-distress act in that little cesspit of a hospital and the Marianna woman still _alive—_ ” he glares daggers at Gao, but she just folds her hands and give him one of those inscrutable looks that he loathes “—there’s nothing else to be done about it.”

“Pull one thread, and the whole knot unravels,” says the jackass. Madame Gao hasn’t said anything at all. Leland scowls.

“Did I ask for your opinion?”

Gao shakes her head at him. Then she says one last thing in Chinese, and turns to stare at the paintings again. They’re old Dutch things, from the seventeenth century, he thinks. Maybe Vermeer, he has no idea. He was never a liberal arts person. The bodyguard looks once at Gao, and then back at Leland, almost curiously. Then he says, “Madame Gao asks me to tell you that the lawyer woman will no longer be a problem. She requests, however, that you look for James Wesley. There is no telling what will happen to Wilson Fisk if his woman and his right-hand man die on the same night.”

Leland swears under his breath. “Don’t fucking guilt-trip me, woman. I had enough of that from the ex-wife.” He stands. “If you’re so worried about James Damn Wesley, look for him yourself. You have enough men for it. Or do they all just stand around and look pretty?”

Gao gives him a look that could cut glass. “The men are preparing for vengeance from the yakuza. You, on the other hand, can operate independently. It’s a division of responsibility.”

“Still feels like you’re dumping it all on me.” He throws his hands in the air. “Fine! I think the kid can handle himself, but god forbid the big guy gets his panties in a knot. Jesus Christ, it’s like I’m the only one that’s not willing to babysit him.”

She says nothing. There’s no reason for him to stay here any longer. Leland gives the translator one last glare, just for the sake of principle, and then turns the collar of his coat up and stalks out of the museum. It’s past closing, and he’s not sure how Gao managed to find her way in here in the first place. He’s not going to ask.

“Fuckin’ conspiracy shit,” he says once he’s outside. He kicks a can someone left on the curb. “Done with this. Should have just moved away from the city when Fisk started talking to you, Leland. Retire. Start a casino. I don’t know. Just get out.”

It’s too late for that now, obviously. But a guy can dream, can’t he? It’s the United States of Fucking America. Of course he can goddamn dream.

.

.

.

Because it’s her life, the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be an oncoming train.

Darcy’s been Netflix surfing, worrying about Kate, and obsessively checking her phone in case Foggy cancels (Josie’s sounds excellent right now, actually; she needs booze for days) for about an hour when the banana phone goes off. Matt (he says he’s meditating, but she’s pretty sure that’s just code for _I’m going to nap, don’t bother me_ ) jolts out of his daze with a noise like a startled kitten, and gives it the Matt Murdock equivalent of a dirty look.

“ _It’s Brett, don’t answer it! It’s Brett, don’t answer it! It’s Brett, don’t—”_

“Do you make them that irritating on purpose, or is this just a natural side-effect?”

“I do it just to annoy you,” Darcy says sweetly, and pauses her episode of _Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt_. “Hey, Brettany.”

“Please, god, don’t ever call me that again,” says Brett fervently. She can hear the chaos of the precinct behind him, a cacophony of phones and voices and metal and life. “If you’re going to call me anything, just—Mahoney. Or Brett. Not Brettnickel or Brettmeister or whatever it is that you decided is the best name to—I don’t even know. Foggy’s picked it up and it’s phenomenally unsettling.”

“Excuse you. It’s charming because I’m charming.” She sets her computer to the side. “Karen said you were gonna call once you grabbed the warrant. Success?”

“Yeah, no dice on that one.” He has that tone in his voice that she recognizes from the Fortnight of Insanity, or…whatever the three-week equivalent of a fortnight is. It’s that weird, skittering voice that means he knows she’s going to react badly to whatever he has to say and so he’s trying to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible. “So I went looking into the paperwork from the docks murder in 2012. Found your travel agency. Very nice people. Told me that their old location with all their cars was burned to the ground by an environmental rights group taking a stand against the fact that they were offering a deal for a Burma trip. Apparently it’s bad for the orangutans or something. Whole place is gone, no records, nothing left. And your boy, Matthew Jenson—that month he was on a business trip to Fiji. Imagine that.”

“You have to be fucking kidding me,” says Darcy. “He could make a fucking phone call from fucking Fiji.”

“Hey, don’t bite my head off, lady, I’m just the delivery boy.”

“Be right back,” says Darcy, and sets the phone aside so she can grab the nearest pillow in her good hand, shove it into her face, and scream until her throat is raw. Matt doesn’t touch her, which is somehow reassuring. She’s pretty sure if he reached out to her right now she would actually bite his hand off. Darcy grabs the phone again, and clears her throat. “You’re sure it’s all gone?”

“Even took a trip down to the old location, just for you. Absolutely nothing left. There’s a laundromat there now. Chinese couple. Use herbal soaps. I saw Foggy on the TV this morning, by the way. For some reason some of the uniforms like to leave the waiting room screen on TMZ.”

“You saw him on TMZ?” They’d broadcasted it already? Holy shit. “Did he do okay?”

“I don’t know, I can never hear anything over these assholes and we can’t work the caption button. Didn’t faint or anything, though. Made the interviewer laugh, I think. You could ask him yourself.”

“Yeah. I could.” She closes her eyes. “Dammit. I should have expected something like this. Of course the judges would scupper it.”

“Hey, now. I took it to some nice-ass judges. They let me down very nicely.” Brett’s voice switches over from Brett her frenemy to Sergeant Mahoney. “Which reminds me: why the hell are you investigating shit like this when you’re a) not with the DA’s office and b) not a cop?”

“Sorry, Brettowski. Hafta go. I have Thai food calling my name.”

“Lewis—”

She hits the end call button, and stares at the banana phone for a moment. Then she stands, and throws the thing as hard as she can across the room. The screen shatters, the banana bell makes a depressed jingling noise, and it skids to a stop underneath the debris that neither of them have yet removed from the apartment. Matt raises his eyebrows at her, but says nothing.

“ _Fucking_ Fisk,” Darcy snarls. “People fucking _everywhere_. God _damn_ it.”

“You murdered your phone,” he says, after a moment.

“Excellent observation,” she snaps, and kicks the wall. “ _Fuck_!”

“So we’ve lost the Andromeda angle.” Matt grabs his glasses off the top of the coffee crate, and slides them onto his face, hooking them behind his ears. Then he heaves himself up onto the couch, trying very hard not to wince. “It’s not the worst thing that could have happened. We still have Tully, and Wexler Sports Equipment.”

“Yeah, but Tully’s in the wind, _as you fucking know_ , and without the link between Jenson and the yakuza and Goodman, the connection to Fisk falls through. They can write it off as—as something that maybe the Wexlers were doing on their own, or whatever. Matthew Jenson is Clark’s uncle, Clark is Rich’s friend, Rich and his dad work directly with the yakuza in shipping Triad smack on behalf of Wilson Fisk. You cut Andromeda out of the chain and it’s just a coincidence. Goodman can plead lack of knowledge.” She kicks the crate this time. “God fucking _dammit_!”

“So you killed your phone.”

“I have the burner,” says Darcy, and then curses. “Fuck. No, I don’t have the burner. It was in my purse and I don’t know where my purse fucking _is.”_ She drags the mangled banana phone out from underneath the trash pile, and hits the power button. It still wakes up, but the screen is smashed to bits. “Fuck. I still have three months on this thing. I can’t afford a new fucking phone on top of every-fucking-thing else.”

“I’m pretty sure you can blame it on falling out of a fourth story window,” says Matt. “You’ll figure something out.”

Her throat squeezes. She drops the phone onto the crate (which is now three feet further to the right and covered in spilled coffee) and presses the heel of her good hand into her eye. “Fucking—I fucking promised Kate, Matt. I said we had enough.”

“But Kate’s case isn’t Fisk’s, Darcy.” Matt rubs his hand over his jaw. “They’re different things.”

“If we take down Fisk, we can take down the Goodmans.”

“But your suit against Rich Goodman is different,” he says, and Darcy presses her eyes closed and pinches the bridge of her bruised nose. “You can take Rich Goodman down without taking out Fisk.”

“I _know_ that, Matt. I just—” She runs a hand over her face. “I wanted to do it neatly. Fuck. It’s all so interconnected anyway, I wanted something that would nail them both at once. I wanted—” _a fairy-tale ending._ “Jesus shit a _brick_.”

“It doesn’t work like that.” Matt leans forward (gingerly, because the trip to Kate’s apartment has made his stitches kind of iffy at best) and tangles his fingers in hers, tugging her back to the couch.

“No, I _know_ it doesn’t work like that. The suits are different, the cases are different. Just— _shit_.” Darcy kicks the base of the couch. “If I dragged Kate into this for no reason—”

“You didn’t.” And, wow, Matt Murdock being reassuring about people dragging other people into crusades? This is interesting. “We just need to find a new tactic. Okay?”

She closes her eyes, and takes three deep breaths. Finishing it all at once is done. Okay. Toss it aside. She’d _told_ herself, before Nobu had grabbed her, that Kate had to be her priority. She’d repeated it to herself, over and over, but she’d forgotten anyway. Probably because of Nobu, and Fisk, and the dark light of an eclipse. _God, I’m such an asshole._ “Okay,” she says, and squeezes his fingers. “Okay. Do you have butcher paper?”

“Back of the closet with the pushpins,” says Matt, and when Darcy blinks at him, he just cocks his head. “How long have I known you now?”

“I love you,” says Darcy fervently, and kisses him. She pulls away before he can really do anything more than smile. “Seriously, I love you _so much_. And I don’t even have to move a fucking _poster_. Thank Jesus and all his toes that you’re blind and don’t need pictures, I swear to god—”

“I’m sure Jesus appreciates that too,” Matt says in a dry voice, but she’s already rooting in the closet.

It’s not as good as her whiteboard, but it’s damn close. She finds a big black marker in one of the drawers in the kitchen (that one drawer everyone has that is just full of weird shit that has no other place) and writes _RICH GOODMAN_ in capital letters across the center of her wall. (Because apparently this is her wall, now. It’s kind of fitting that she has her back turned on the assholish billboard.) “The Wexler stuff we can still use against Fisk,” she says, and adds a side-list of _No Longer Required_ to the right of her mind map. “But that’s not something for Kate. So, scrapped.”

“Clark Jenson and Mathias Lynch were at the club with Rich Goodman,” says Matt, turning on the sofa so he’s kind of facing her. “You have Callie’s testimony, the girl with the drugs, and the bouncer, and the bartender.”

“I have Kate, too, obviously, and O’Reilly for the cop bits.” She makes an arm for each name. “I have the fucked-up documentation which we _know_ was Fisk’s cronies doing a favor for Goodman because he ships their drugs, but that can’t be brought into _this_. So yeah. Mysterious misplacement of records and mucking-up of tests.”

“Lynch and Jenson are back in town, which we know.”

“Their lawyers also never called me back, which was something we also knew.” She puts a question mark under their names. “Rich Goodman has a bodyguard, which you oh-so-nicely found out for me, but these two—I don’t know about them.”

Matt’s quiet for a moment. Then he says, “I need to go out tonight anyway. I could stop by and see what they’re doing.”

“Out like—to the corner Thai place?” She chews on the end of her marker. “Or out like— _out_.”

“Out like out,” says Matt.

“Oh. So, the most intelligent option, then.”

“Fisk—there was something on him that I didn’t recognize. He didn’t bleed when you threw the knife at him, and he should have. There was something. Not—not his clothes, but _in_ his clothes. It shifted when he moved, inside the suit. I think it was some kind of armor. Light, but thin. Nothing I’ve ever found on the streets.”

“I propose a motion to change your nickname from the devil of Hell’s Kitchen to the hellhound. It’s more apt. Also, alliterative.” Her heart’s caught in her throat. “Are you even up for that? You still look like shit from where I’m standing.”

“I’m not going to go and pick a fight with Fisk. I’m just going to ask some people some questions, in a reasonable sort of way.”

“Reasonable by their standards or reasonable by yours?”

Matt gives her a _what do you think?_ expression. Darcy sighs. “I feel like I should be objecting to this, considering I stitched you up for the—what is it, now, third? The third time a little more than seven hours ago. You’re going to run out of skin for me to poke holes in. It’s not gonna be pretty.”

“It’s not like I’m planning to mount a major offensive. And I can’t afford to wait on it. Fisk’s distracted by this—food poisoning thing, whatever it really is. If there’s any time for me to find out what he’s been using, and what his underlings are doing, it’s now.”

“Less than three days after one of said underlings stabbed you in the guts.”

“Darcy.”

“Hey.” She holds up both hands. “I will back you up in whatever you choose to do, Matt. I understand that in order for this to work you’re going to have to be able to go and beat up bad guys whenever you feel like it. I just don’t want you to come back to the apartment, y’know. Dead.”

“Asking a few questions about armor isn’t going to get me killed.” He still turns a bit grey when he heaves himself up off the couch. “Do me a favor. There’s a box, in that locked closet over there. Help me get it out.”

Darcy’s never seen this trunk. Wait, no, that’s not quite true. She _has_ seen this trunk, but only ever under Matt’s dorm bed. She’d always just assumed he’d kept crap he didn’t need anymore in there, never asked. When he opens it, though, she bites her lip, and reaches out to the sleeve of the uniform. It’s clean, a little dusty. The fabric is dangerously soft against her fingertips. “This is all your dad’s stuff?”

“Yeah.” Matt touches the back of the _J_ in _Battlin’ Jack_. Then he seizes the compartment divider, and sets it aside. Darcy had had to cut his black shirt off him in order to get the wound clean enough to stitch, but in here there are more; no sticks, but pants, shirts, gloves. There’s another box farther back in the closet, and in there are stacked boxes of boots. Darcy whistles low.

“You weren’t kidding when you said you had extra pairs of gloves.”

“I had to order it in bulk so nobody at the company put two and two together.” He presses a hand to the bandage over his stomach, and then grabs another ski-mask out from underneath the pile of uniforms. “It should only take me a few hours to track down the people I need, and then I can look into Lynch and Jenson. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Lynch and Jenson live in an apartment building that’s more like a fuckin’ Ritz than anything. It’s probably crawling with security guards.”

“Fire escape.”

“With Nobu’s present and that broken rib that I _know_ you still have? Don’t bullshit me, that shit doesn’t just go away. Even with your super-special meditation.” Darcy draws another shirt out of the trunk, running her fingertips over the seam of the collar. She frowns. “So what’s your plan B?”

“I don’t generally have a plan B.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“I’ve done more with worse,” Matt says shortly, and that right there is something she never really wanted to know. “I already know who I have to talk to. I just have to find him.”

“One of Fisk’s guys?”

“One of the Russians’, actually. Or he used to be. Human trafficker. Higher up in the organization than he acts. Snake in the grass.” Matt tugs a glove on, and clenches his hand into a fist. “Information broker on the side. If anyone knows where Fisk gets his armor—”

“—if he even has any and he’s not some kind of mutant armadillo—”

Matt ignores this. “—then it would be him.”

“Body armor.” Body armor sounds like a good idea. “Okay. So body armor first. Then Lynch and Jenson. They could be out clubbing, it’s the right sort of night for it. Which would be so much easier than just, y’know, climbing millions of stairs.”

Matt turns to her, and his eyebrows snap together. “Darcy.”

She pastes on an innocent face. “What?”

“You’re not coming.”

“I’m not coming just because I want to. I’m sincerely concerned you’re going to hurt yourself.”

His mouth twists. “I’m not going to hurt myself.”

“Oh,” says Darcy, acidly. “So you’re just going to stand around looking intimidating near people in the Russian mafia. Because that works.”

Matt makes a hissing sound that she remembers from studying in undergrad, the one he only made when she’d managed, on very rare occasions, to correct him about the minutiae of criminal procedure law. “If they recognize you, it would be a problem.”

“I have make-up. I can go incognito.”

“You have a broken arm.”

“A broken wrist. And you have a hole in your abdomen.”

Matt makes the hissing sound again. He doesn’t say anything, though. Darcy gets up on her knees and tugs through the box of goodies again, through shirts and pants that are too big for her, and gloves that almost fit. Her fingernails scrape against a cardboard box down at the bottom. “What’s this?”

“I ordered in bulk, remember? It came for free. A promotional thing. There were a few of them, actually. Promotions. That was the biggest.”

Darcy tugs it out. It’s a taser. _Protection at a distance_ , the back of the box reads. _With stunning capabilities at close range._ (Haha, _stunning_ , get it? _Shut up, Lewis._ ) Hell of a lot of volts, for something shipped into New York State. She tears through the tape holding the box together with her fingernails, and tugs it out onto her lap. It’s heavy and black and there’s even a little holster to go with it, and when she lifts it, it feels right in her hand.

“Hey, Matt,” she says. “Why’d you never use this?”

“Takes too long to reload.” Matt tugs a fresh pair of boots out of the box of shoes. “Doesn’t send the same sort of message.”

“For long-distance shots, sure, you need to reload.” She turns it this way and that, and then nods once. “Can I have it?”

Matt frowns. “They’re not legal in the city.”

“Says the guy who goes around beating the snot out of people in the middle of the night.” She’s tempted to pull the trigger, but that would probably be a bad idea in an enclosed space with a very twitchy semi-invalid in the immediate vicinity. “I think I can survive a concealed weapons charge. _If_ they catch me. I have a few very powerful excuses.”

“I thought you weren’t planning on becoming a vigilante,” Matt says, with a twist to his mouth. She wonders if that’s what they should really call it. _Hero_ sounds better. She grabs the holster for the taser, and fits it around her thigh, thoughtfully. If she tightens it properly, she can drop her hand and touch the grip of the taser without even trying.

“I’m not.” She draws the taser, and aims it at the opposite wall. “Doesn’t mean I can’t scare the shit out of some asshole rapists.”

Matt rocks back on his heels. She can see it in his face, the conflict—protective instincts vs. logic in her arming herself vs. knowledge that she’ll sneak out and do it anyway even if he argues with her, because hell yes she fucking will. She hopes that the knowledge also includes _Darcy can and will do things herself_ in general rather than in specifics. She’s pretty sure it does. Finally, he says, “You’re sure?”

Darcy slides the taser back into the holster. “No,” she says, shortly. “But you need backup, and Kate needs this done. So I’m doing it anyway.”

“You’re breaking the law.”

“The law hasn’t been helping me all that much lately. Considering, y’know. How Fisk owns it.”

He makes an impatient noise. “You could get hurt, they would _kill_ you if they realized—”

“Okay. I’m going to go into the bathroom for a few minutes. When I come back out, this conversation is restarting. And don’t you dare think about sneaking off while I’m in there, because I might not have super-hearing, but you crash a lot when you’re in major pain.”

He slams the lid of the trunk down. “Goddammit, Darcy, this isn’t a _joke._ ”

“No, it’s _not_.” She scrapes at the back of her cast with her nails. “Goodman tried to have me beaten into submission. I heard Blake die. Nobu fucking _tortured_ me. I watched him burn and I didn’t feel _anything._ So yeah. It’s not a fucking joke. Not to me.” Darcy drops the taser onto the couch, and crosses her arms tight across her chest. “I said you didn’t have to do this by yourself anymore. I meant it, Matt. You don’t have to handle all of this alone. And I’ll be damned if I let you try it for the sake of your goddamn complex.”

She can’t read his face. Not when he’s wearing his glasses. Matt sighs. “I don’t want you coming with me when I track down the information broker. I don’t want him to know that you exist. If what’s left of Vladimir and Anatoly’s people hear about you, then they’ll do to you what they tried to do to Claire, and I can’t—I can’t handle that. At least not until you know more about how to protect yourself. Please.”

It’s a steep compromise, but it’s the only one she’s going to get at the moment. “Fine. You call me every half an hour so I know you’re still alive. Actually, you call me every half an hour and if you need help for _any_ reason, you call me no matter what.”

“Deal.” He frowns. “You’re going to need a turtleneck for when you talk to Jenson and Lynch.”

“Hm?”

“The tattoo.” Matt touches the back of her neck, lightly. “It’s distinctive. And if you have another wig, you should use that. Earrings, piercings, out. They’re unique, they can be recognized.”

She taps her tongue piercing against the back of her teeth, and thinks mournfully of having to get it repierced. “Fine. What else?”

Matt goes silent. Then he rests his fingertips to his jaw. “You’re going to need a mask,” he says, and a shiver of _something_ darts up Darcy’s spine. “Not one like mine. Something else.”

“There’s that costume place near my apartment. I can check it out when I go to meet Foggy.”

His mouth tightens, but he nods once, and draws a pair of pants into his lap. “I’ll go talk to the man I need to while you—while you’re at Josie’s. Take my phone. I’ll use my own burner. I’ll call you every half an hour. Okay?"

“Yeah.” She lets out a breath. “Okay. And if they’re not at the apartment, meet at Daily Daze at midnight. The place is open until five am, and judging from what I found out about Rich Goodman from Kate, it’s their favorite dealing grounds. They must have an arrangement with the management to sell their drugs without getting into too much trouble.” She tastes something sour in her mouth. “Rich kids with Daddy’s money.” 

“Don’t be sexist,” Matt says mildly. “It could be Mom’s money,”

“Setting aside how sexism is societal and not individual, I like to think that if it’s Mom’s money then the kid wouldn’t be out selling drugs on the street in the first place.” Darcy touches a fist to her breast, and then swings it out. “All hail the Many Mothers.”

“Plan?”

“The costume shop. Then home—Jen will be out, and Karen’s probably arguing with Ben. If I go now nobody will notice. Then Foggy—” her heart clenches “—and then I’ll meet you at Daily Daze. Or at Lynch and Jenson’s bedsit. Wherever we need to go.” There’s something scaly curled tightly around her heart, exhaling heat. Like a wyrm. Or a dragon. _This is for Kate_ , she thinks, and looks down at the taser on her hip. _This is for the women like her, who’ve been brutalized by these bastards. And most of all, this is for me._ Her skin is cool, almost cold. She feels like she should be breathing fire. “I’m going to shower. You’re not going to wander off on your own, are you?”

“And risk you ripping me to pieces when you track me down? No.”

She hums. When she bends down, Matt turns his face up to meet her. Their glasses click until they find the right angle, and then—oh, hello. There’s something greedy and new in the way he’s kissing her, like he’s trying to memorize her in a whole new way. She kneels next to him, to keep her back from hurting, and slides her good hand underneath the soft fabric of his T-shirt, curling her thumb against the skin just above his hip. The noise he makes tangles in her mouth, and something in her chest purrs.

“Okay.” She threads her fingers through his, and eases back. “Down, boy. I’m not stitching you up again.”

He tugs on a strand of hair that’s fallen forward over her shoulder. “Not used to it. That’s all.”

“What, working with someone?”

“That.” His mouth quirks. “And being able to kiss you.”

Well. She didn’t need her heart, anyway. She swallows hard, and grips him by the collar of his shirt, tugging him forward until his mouth crashes into hers again. It’s probably exactly what he planned, to be entirely honest, but she doesn’t really care.

She doesn’t quite get around to taking a shower before scooting out the door, but, y’know. YOLO. The costume place is dim and almost empty, but the Russian woman who’s sitting the counter brightens immensely when Darcy creeps in, and starts to chatter. Darcy doesn’t really remember a lot of Russian (her babushka tried to teach her, but she’d died before Eli did, so it hasn’t stuck) but she can keep up well enough that she can smile and say “ _da_ ” or “ _nyet_ ” or ask after Katya’s kids. She’s been coming to this place every Halloween since she moved to the city. Foggy has a theory that the grandmother who lives upstairs works black magic, but that’s only because they always seem to know when Darcy’s coming. They’re nice. It only takes about half an hour for them to find a mask that will work (black on one side, white on the other, a full face mask that doesn’t make her cheeks sweat and a strong strap to keep it from coming off too easy). She buys a wig, too, red hair cropped close to her jaw, and make-up (her bank account is going to hate her) before heading upstairs for a little bit to talk to Katya’s mother. The sun has set and she’s already had one call from Matt by the time Darcy escapes with a paper bag full of still-warm gingerbread, and lots of affectionate patting.

The apartment seems quiet, for the most part. The umbrella’s gone, which means Jen’s still out of the house (probably working late, again, like Darcy has room to talk). Karen’s purse isn’t on the floor near the kitchen door, so she’s out too. Still, Darcy realizes her mistake the instant she smells fresh-cooked tortilla. Mrs. Cardenas is still here. It’s not as though she’s trying to keep the fact that she’s at the apartment a secret or anything, she just—doesn’t really want to deal with a lot of questions about why she’s sneaking out clothes best suited for clubbing when she’s technically supposed to be resting her head and not doing anything that could count as “overexertion.” It’s a bit too late to stop it, though. She pokes her head into the kitchen. “ _Hola,_ Elena.”

Elena drops the spatula, and puts a hand to her heart. “ _Ay, Dios mio._ You _scare_ me.” Then she actually looks at Darcy, and her eyes widen. “Darcy, _su rostro._ _¡Se ve terrible!_ ”

“ _Gracias_ , Elena,” says Darcy, trying not to smile. She sets the bag of gingerbread on the table, and comes around to put her good arm around Elena’s shoulders. Elena’s arm is bandaged up with fresh white gauze, but it makes her fierce instead of fragile. A wounded warrior instead of a frightened old woman. “ _Solo vine a recoger algunas cosas._ ”

“ _Está bien_?” Elena pats at her upper arm, the good one, her eyes not leaving the splints on Darcy’s fingers. “ _Le dije que usted era una mala mentirosa._ ”

“ _No me ha visto mentir_.” Darcy smiles. “ _Le dije que todo estaría bien, y lo está._ ”

Elena gives her a very sharp look. “ _Esto? Esto no está bien_.”

“ _Esto también sanará. Estaré bien. Cómo está su brazo?_ ”

It’s a really bad attempt to change the subject, but it works. Elena blows air out of her nose, and turns back to the skillet she has set up on their shitty stove, the one that Jen’s dad had left with them the one and only time he’d visited (Jen and her dad don’t get along very well). “ _Está bien. He tenido peores cortes con cuchillos que esto. Solo estoy preocupada que los otros vendan, si me quedo aquí. Pero no hay nada que podamos hacer, hasa que capturen a esos hombres._ ”

“ _Estamos trabanjando en ello,_ Elena _._ ”

“Mm.” Elena folds the fresh tortilla, and sets it on a plate. Then she turns, and pats Darcy’s cheek with one floury hand. “I say before. You are good girl.”

Darcy thinks of the taser in her purse, of Foggy. _Put an arrow in Rich Goodman’s eye socket._ “Not really. I’m kind of an asshole most of the time.”

“ _Eso_ ,” Elena says, “ _es una mierda. Esta tratando. Eso es todo lo que se puede pedir. Además._ ” She gives Darcy a look over the top of her glasses, her eyebrows rising. “ _Me salvó la vida. El hombre que intentó hacerme daño está muerto, ahora, per usted me salvó de él. Eso la hace buena. No crea nada distinto a eso._ ”

Darcy smiles. At least, she tries to. She clenches her jaw to keep it from shaking, but there’s a hot poker pressing against the backs of her eyes, and when Elena reaches out again, touching her shoulder, she has to gulp back tears.

“This is stupid.” She wipes at her eyes. “I’ve—I have a plan, I know what I’m doing, why am I— _shit._ ”

“Is okay.” Elena herds her into a chair, and returns to her tortilla making. She spreads the mix flat over the skillet in a smooth spinning motion, crafting an even circle with a practiced flick of the wrist. “Karen, she tell me. _Los chicos tuvieron una pelea, no? Y fue mala?_ ”

She chokes on her tongue. Darcy swallows air, and coughs. “ _Hemos peleado antes_ ,” she says finally, and Elena nods over the stove. “ _No es como si no lo hubiéramos hecho—hemos tenido desacuerdos. Pero no es—nunca han sido as _í_. Y yo solo_ — _”_

She stops.

“You’re scared,” Elena says quietly. She flips her tortilla. “You think is your fault.”

“No.” She shakes her head. “I know whose fault it is. I—I kept a secret, and there’s nothing wrong in that. But—but I’m scared that it can’t be fixed. That’s what I’m scared of.”

“Ay.” Elena turns off the stove, and peels the last tortilla up off her skillet. Then she puts her hands on her hips. “You wait here,” she says, and before Darcy can blink, she’s gone. Darla creeps into the kitchen and jumps up into Darcy’s lap, smearing her black skirt with cat fur. Darcy scritches behind her ears, and raps Darla’s nose hard when she tries to bite. Only a few minutes have passed by the time Elena returns, holding a battered bag in one hand and a paper package in the other. It’s Darcy’s purse. She sets the purse on the table, and then comes around to Darcy, pressing the papery lump into her good hand. “Is yours. I saved.”

Darcy looks at her for a long moment. Then she tears the edge of the paper. It’s the blonde wig, neatly braided and curled into something approximating a circle, so it can be packaged more easily. She can’t remember seeing it past when Nobu collected her. She looks up. “You grabbed this?”

“ _Sí_.” Elena licks her lip, and then tugs a chair around to sit opposite Darcy. She takes the wig from her, and sets it on the table. “Your friends, they love you. I see. _No la culpan, por lo que sea. Y si lo hacen, hablaré con ellos._ ”

Darcy laughs. It’s damp, and catches in her throat. “ _Foggy se moriría si hace eso._ ”

“Darcy, _cariña_ , _escúchame_.” Elena bites her lower lip. “What you do, I don’t know. Why those men— _porque la secuestraron, no lo sé tampoco._ But you are _good_. Their fight, is not your fault. And what you do now—” she gives her a quelling look, and Darcy shuts her mouth “— _eso es bueno._ Do not forget.”

For some reason, Darcy’s eyes are drawn to the crucifix around Elena’s neck. It’s not particularly expensive-looking, just a sliver of gold with a molded Jesus, but it’s nestled in the hollow of her throat like a precious talisman. The chain is worn, like she tugs on it. Darcy chokes down a sob, closes her eyes, and nods once, and Elena stands and hugs her. She smells like flour and some kind of perfume that is almost like roses.

“I stay here,” she says. “You need help, _dígamelo. Y cuando necesite a alquien con quien hablar, estoy aquí._ ”

Darcy honestly can’t imagine telling Elena anything that’s been happening in her life right now, even if she _is_ so goddamn badass and amazing that it makes her cry a little to see it. Still, she wraps her arms around Elena’s waist, and ignores Darla’s unhappy noises from between them. ( _Stupid cat. Just leave if you’re so uncomfortable._ ) “Thank you, Elena,” she says, and Elena strokes her hand down Darcy’s hair. “ _Lamento lo de su hogar._ ”

“ _Ami mi hogar, pero solo es un lugar._ If people get hurt, I no need. There are other places.” She considers. “My son, he might have idea. I check.”

“No.” Darcy pulls back. “We’ll get your place back, Elena. We’ll fix it. _Lo haremos_.”

Elena smiles, and pets Darcy’s hair in silence.

.

.

.

It’s a day with a name that ends in _Y_ , which means that as divey as Josie’s can be, it’s still a pain in the ass to get to the bar without getting her ass grabbed. Darcy rolls her good wrist until it cracks, and goes up on tiptoe (easier to do, in her sex-boots) so she can pick the back of Foggy’s head out of the tumble of truckers at the nearby tables. Foggy’s at the bar, staring at the counter and drawing a pattern in sugar on the bartop. She can smell the alcohol on him from a good three feet off. “Hey,” she says, digging her fingernails into her palm. She bounces up onto the bar stool. Foggy gives her half a glance, and then does a double-take.

“Holy shit, Darcy, what’s with the outfit? Are you trying to look like a vampire?”

“It takes a lot of make-up to cover the bruises. Figured I’d just go the whole hog and pull a Halloween rather than try to bullshit my way through it.” She tugs her braid over her shoulder. “And I’m going to a club after this. Elena helped me pick it.”

“ _Elena_ helped you—” His eyes nearly cross with how fast he looks away. “Not going to ask.”

“Dude, lady’s a badass. I want to keep her always.” She gives Josie a little wave. “So yeah. A club. Vampier the better.”

“A club,” Foggy repeats. He’s either not as drunk as he smells, or he’s had so much that he’s crossed the line back into sober again (which shouldn’t technically be possible, but she’s seen him do it once or twice, so whatever) because the look he gives her is so sharp she nearly cuts herself. “You have a concussion, a broken wrist, a broken rib, four broken fingers and a thumb, and a hole in your hand, and you’re going to a _club_. In leather pants. Which Elena Cardenas helped you pick out.”

It is, of course, that moment that Josie crops up. Rosa’s perched on her shoulder, her eyes half-lidded, her crest folded back. “You want anything?” Josie says, and then blinks, and looks closer. “Jesus, Lewis, what’s with the war paint?”

“I’m going into battle. By the end of the night I will smear my face with the blood of my enemies.” She holds her fingers out to Rosa, who nudges at them with her wicked beak. Rosa doesn’t _like_ Darcy, exactly, but she doesn’t dislike her, either, which puts her one over Matt and Foggy. Rosa _hates_ Matt. 99% of the time if she’s divebombing someone, it’s going to be Matt Murdock. _Maybe it’s a cat-vs.-bird thing._ Because in all honesty, if Matt’s anything, he’s basically just a scruffy, grumpy feral cat. “Can I just get a vodka tonic? Only one, I’m heading out soon and I need to be able to balance in these shoes.”

Josie eyes Darcy’s hand, but she nods once and heads off again. Foggy’s returned to drawing patterns in the sugar. Where he found a sugar bowl in a bar as divey as Josie’s, she has no idea, but he’s Foggy. He can magic up anything, anywhere. “So. I heard from Karen that you’re ignoring her.”

“I’m not ignoring her. I’m ignoring everyone. There’s a difference.”

“You’re not ignoring me.”

“That’s because you guilt me. And you look like a sad puppy.” He pauses. “Well, now you look like a desperate hooker. But before you looked like a sad puppy.”

“Thanks for stereotyping all sex workers everywhere.” Her red wig is peeking out of the top of her purse. She ignores it. “Karen thinks that you’re ignoring her because we don’t know her well enough to tell her shit. Which, obviously, is bull, but since we’re all so chock-full of issues that I’m surprised we don’t have a reality TV show, it doesn’t surprise me that Karen’s the same. How did the TMZ interview go?”

“Kate was angry that I had to come instead of you. Also about the fact that you were kidnapped. The reporter was a bitch and someone made me spit-shine my shoes before going on air. Basically it was everything I expected it to be.” He draws a dead smiley face in the sugar, and then swipes it out. “Remind me to never go on TV again. Or to trash this suit. Or both.”

“Sure, I can remind you.” She pauses. “That is, if you’re still speaking to me in a few days’ time. Which I would understand. If you didn’t want to be.”

Foggy groans, and drapes himself across the counter, hiding his head in his arms. “Darcy, I get that you’re like—trying to help and shit, but it’s kind of doing the opposite of helping.”

“Yeah, I know.”

He lifts his head again. “You lied to me,” he snaps. “Matt lied to me. And I’m supposed to be okay with it, apparently? And, surprise, I’m really actually fucking not.”

“I never said you had to be okay with it.” Darcy crosses her legs at the knee. There’s a _19 Kids and Counting_ reject eying her legs, and her fingers are itching for the taser in her purse. “What we did to you was shitty and terrible, and I cannot _ever_ say how sorry I am. Not just—not just for Matt’s deal, which you _know_ you would have never believed if I’d told you, and you _know_ you would have never told me if he’d confessed to you first—” Foggy opens his mouth, and then shuts it again “—but because I never, ever wanted to hurt you, or make you lose trust in me, and I’m so sorry that I did, Foggy.”

He rocks his shot glass back and forth, not speaking.

“I don’t expect forgiveness for it, and I don’t expect understanding. The only reason I wanted to talk to you tonight was to tell you that even if you never speak to me again, I am never, ever going to lie to you. Not about any of this. There might be things I can’t tell you, at least not right away. If I can’t talk about something, I’ll say it. But I won’t lie. I can only hope that’s enough.”

She’s halfway off her stool, wondering if she can make it outside without giving in to the tears pressing against her throat, when Foggy says, “How did you figure it out?”

She stops, one foot on the floor, the other still hooked into the leg of the bar stool. “Figure what out?”

“Matt.” He tips his shot glass so far back that it nearly topples. “How did you figure it out?”

Darcy pauses. Then she slides back up onto her stool again. Foggy doesn’t look at her, but he doesn’t jerk away, either. It’s a start. “He didn’t tell me,” she says. “When—when Goodman had me attacked, he must have heard them. He was going to just—he was going to leave, not—not bring me into it, but I asked him to help me take down Goodman.”

“Without knowing it was—” Josie passes, and Foggy shuts his mouth.

“Yeah. Without knowing.” Her vodka tonic arrives. She toasts Josie (and Rosa) and lifts it to her lips. It bites at her throat. “I should have recognized him, I guess. He doesn’t—he changed his voice, a little, but all his mannerisms were the same. That’s probably why Wesley thought I knew who he was. But I didn’t put it together until Wesley—Psycho Glasses Killer—until he threatened to kill me.”

Foggy’s eyes drop to her hand, and stick there.

“I confronted him about it.” She puts her glass back on the counter. “It wasn’t pretty. So yeah. I can kind of get where you are right now. It sucks, and it’s like—I always thought feeling like you’ve been stabbed in the back was a figure of speech, but—but that’s what it feels like. Like there’s something in you that’s been poisoned and you can’t carve it out. Like you don’t know where the ground is anymore. Like—like you’re an idiot, and you should have known better.”

“It’s not even the lying that bothers me, really,” Foggy says. Darcy sips at her drink, and waits. “And—and what you did, yeah, it hurt like a son of a bitch, but I can understand it. You kept a secret for a friend, and that’s—that’s understandable. What I don’t get is the fucking _hypocrisy_. He’s—he was sitting there telling us to do things by the book and to be safe and then he goes out in the middle of the night and apparently duels with—with fucking ninjas, and he expects us to just accept it. Like it’s normal. Like he’s not lying through his teeth.”

Darcy swirls her drink in the glass. “I think it has something to do with the fact that he’s—you know he has an issue with saving people. Like…like with Karen, and Elena, and all of it.” _You make me better,_ he’d said, and it still hurts, thinking it. “I think it comes from Matt—Matt doesn’t think he’s as good as other people. I don’t know if it’s the Catholicism—” Foggy’s mouth trembles a little into half a smile “—or because it’s just—who he is, or what happened to his dad—” _or because of Stick_ “—or any of it, but he thinks he doesn’t matter as much.” She swallows another mouthful of vodka. “It’s—it’s bullshit, but it’s not—I don’t know how to change his mind about it. I don’t think any of us are ever going to be able to, because it’s something that he has to realize, himself. But to him, because he doesn’t _matter_ in the same way we do, to him, it’s more important to keep us safe than it is to—to realize that we’d want the same thing for him. I don’t think he sees it as hypocrisy, or if he does, he doesn’t like to think about it. To him, it’s a natural progression of what he’s trying to do. And—and if he loses us in the process, then in a weird way, he’ll know for certain that we’re safe. Because we’ll be as far away from him as possible.”

Foggy’s eyes are wet. He rubs at them with one fist, and knocks back his shot of tequila. Darcy blinks furiously to keep her make-up from smearing, and sips at her vodka tonic, not looking at him anymore. He pours himself another shot, and then leans back, staring hard at the fluorescent lighting. “Jesus. What the fuck is _wrong_ with him?”

She snorts, a little. It hurts her throat. “A lot of things. But there’s a lot of things wrong with me, too.”

“Hey, don’t kick me out of your poor-psychotic-me club. I have issues.” Foggy toasts her, and takes the shot. “Admittedly not—not quite on the same scale as living next to a child murderer and _insane_ inferiority complexes, but there’re problems. I can be dark and mysterious, too.”

“The darkest and most mysterious.” She hesitates, and then puts her hand on his forearm. Foggy lets out a sharp breath, and covers her hand with his, squeezing hard. “I’m so sorry, Foggy.”

“You know, you were supposed to come here, and I was going to yell at you, and it was going to make me feel better, and then—and then I’d get absolutely blasted and not remember most of it. This—this putting things in perspective thing? Not part of the plan. You suck.” His gaze drops to her pants again. “You’re going to go help him with something after this, aren’t you?”

“Technically, he’s the one helping me.” She checks her burner phone, and then Matt’s phone. He hasn’t called yet, but it’s still twenty minutes to the mark, and she doesn’t want to call him in case the ringtone alerts anyone to his position. Or something. “I’m working on something for Kate. So he’s backing me up, not the other way around.”

Foggy blinks. “I thought—”

“I can guess what you were thinking.” She doesn’t say it in any way that could come across as confrontational, but he still flinches. “Foggy, I’m not doing this just because—because it’s Matt, or because of how I feel about Matt, which, shut up, don’t even start. I’m doing this because I _want_ to do this. Because I need to be involved in this. Same way Karen needs to be involved in taking down Fisk, or—or Kate needs to be involved in getting rid of Richard Goodman. I need to do this for _me._ Matt’s just helping me do it.”

He watches her in silence, his eyes still huge. Darcy swallows.

“Does that bother you?”

“I don’t know,” he says, slowly. “Kind of. A little bit. Yeah.” He chokes. “Wait, when you were saying blood of your enemies earlier, did you actually mean—”

“As tempting as that is, no. I’m just going to scare them a little bit.” She pauses. “Though your definition of scaring and mine might be different now.”

“Jesus,” says Foggy again. His eyes are so wide she can see the whites all the way around the iris. “I don’t know which of you is more frightening, you or him.”

“Wow.” That actually hurts. “Ouch.”

“That’s not—that’s not what I meant.” He knocks his knuckles to his forehead. “I guess—he might—might do what he does, and possibly kill people—”

“He doesn’t kill people.”

“Fine. He might make people wish they were dead, but you—I hate to make weird metaphors here, but it’s like you have him on a leash. It’s _so weird_.” His eyes narrow. “If he’s the devil of Hell’s Kitchen, and you can—not boss him around, exactly, but like…aim him a certain direction, then what does that make you? Lilith?”

“Lilith.” She knocks him in the shoulder with one fist. “Jesus, you comparing me to Adam’s ex-wife? The mother of all demons? Thanks, Foggy.”

“Hey, I know absolutely nothing about religion. My parents are reluctantly Protestant and aside from one or two weddings I’ve never actually been in a church. I just remember you talking about her during undergrad.” He whacks at her, more a pat than a strike, and her lips twitch up. Then he says, “So, does that mean you’re—helping him, from now on? Being his Girl Friday, or—whatever fucked up analogy can be made here.”

“I don’t know. Technically in this circumstance he’s being _my_ Girl Friday, but in future, I don’t…I don’t know.” Fisk’s on the TV again. He’s not talking to reporters, or anything. It’s just a sudden, jostled clip of him getting out of a car and talking in a low voice with James Wesley. The footage has to be a week old, at least. Darcy stares at it until Foggy follows her gaze, and hisses through his teeth. Then she says, “Sometimes I think it’d feel really fucking good to do what he does.”

“Well, yeah, I fantasize about beating people up, too, but I don’t actually _do_ it.”

She smiles, tight and small. “Getting tortured kind of changes your priorities.”

“I think you can keep that particular experience,” Foggy says, but when she gets off her stool, he stands, too. He rubs the palms of his hands against his pants. Then, with a look on his face that she can’t quite define, he opens his arms. Darcy’s lungs squeeze. She steps forward, and hugs him hard, squishing her broken wrist between them until tears spring to her eyes. Foggy heaves a sigh that seems to come from the center of the earth, and holds on. When he pulls back, there are definitely damp spots on his cheeks. “Don’t be an idiot. _Don’t get caught._ And tell that angsty asshole that if you get hurt again, I’m going to kill him. I’ll drop a fucking anvil on his head like Wile E. Fucking Coyote.”

“I think he knows that already.” Shut up. She doesn’t sound like she’s been crying. _You_ sound like you’ve been crying. Darcy’s never so grateful for her highest heels than she is right now, because it means she can kiss Foggy’s cheek without having to go up on tiptoe. “I’ll call you when I get back to where I’m staying. If that’s okay.”

“Of course that’s okay.” Foggy squeezes her until her ribs ache. “You have CC’s number?”

“Yeah, I have CC’s number. I’m not gonna need it, tonight, but I have it.” She sniffs. “You’re so obnoxious.”

“Big brothers are like that,” he says, and then pushes her away. “Go away. I’m gonna be a man and cry into my shot glass, now. Because you’ve made it hard to be mad at people anymore, and you’re a terrible, terrible person.”

“Technically I’m three months older than you,” she says, but she smiles anyway. “ _Te amo, hermano._ ”

“ _Mi aerodelizador está lleno de anguilas._ ”

Josie spits up her mouthful of beer.

.

.

.

There’s water dripping close by. That’s the first thing she knows. There’s a funny, sickly sweet smell still hanging around her nose and mouth, making her woozy. And there’s panic, rushing under her skin like a tide, screaming. _Wake up, wake up, wake up._

“You know,” says a voice close by, “if I had had to put money on it, back when I was a betting man, I wouldn’t have tapped the women of Nelson, Murdock and Lewis as being the ones who would become such an enormous pain in the ass.”

She wakes in a surge. Karen heaves a breath, and tries to sit up, but it’s all she can do to breathe. _Something’s wrong with me._ The smell won’t go away. It’s clinging like a sickness, a disease that might kill her eventually. She hears footsteps. Someone touches her shoulder. She clenches her fingernails into her palms, trying to yank, to get away, but she can’t move. She can’t _move._

Then the other chair creaks, and she sees him. _Union Allied_ , she thinks first. Then, _Fisk._ Then, finally: _James Wesley._ He’s leaning back in his chair with an almost bored expression, cleaning his glasses on the underside of his shirt. He slides them back onto his face. “I was never that good of a gambler,” he continues. “I lost more than I won, mostly because everyone around me cheated. But I was _very_ good at reading tells. I could always tell when to fold, because I always knew when the people around me had a winning hand. But you two—you keep surprising me.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Karen says, and she hates the way her voice shakes.

“I don’t believe you are, but I’m appreciative of the sentiment.” He sighs. “You’re not going to pass out again, are you? I’d rather not have to sit here for another hour waiting for you to come ‘round.”

She’s not tied. If she wants to, she could bolt. But she can’t move—lead in her bones, in her marrow, terror weighing herdown—and it’s too dark in here to see a door. She’d rather not take that chance. Not yet, anyway. “Where’s—where’s your boss?”

“At the hospital, as he’s been for the past two and a half days.” Wesley considers her the same way someone would consider a bug under a microscope, a faraway sort of curiosity. “I saw no reason to bring him into this. After all, he has more important things to worry about.”

“Is that supposed to make me cry?” Karen snaps. She digs her nails into her chair. “Or—or beg you not to kill me? Sorry, but usually when people expect me to do things, I do the exact opposite.”

“I’ve gathered that.” Wesley gives her a long, exasperated look. “You were supposed to go away, you know. All four of you were, really. And two of you did. Even if Murdock did show an exceptional amount of interest in who I am, where I came from, he seemed to let it go eventually. But you and Lewis—” He shakes his head. “Other people would say it’s because you’re women, that you just don’t know when to let a matter drop. But that’s not it at all, is it?”

“You’re a pig.”

“I voted for Hilary in ’08. I think that gets me a free pass.”

“I’m so proud of you,” Karen spits. “If you’re trying to scare me, it’s not working.”

“That? No, that’s not supposed to scare you.” Wesley leans forward, and draws a gun. He settles it on the table with the same care as another person would an infant, and Karen’s eyes snap to it. Her heart stops in her chest. “This is.”

She stares.

“Now,” says Wesley. “Can we have a chat like civilized people, or do I have to gag you, too?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Karen bb u gon be fine
> 
> Elena: “ _Oh my god_. You scare me. Darcy, _your face. You look terrible._ ”  
> Darcy: “ _Thanks,_ Elena. _I just came to grab some of my things._ ”  
> Elena: “ _You’re all right? I told you that you were a bad liar._ ”  
> Darcy: “ _You haven’t seen me lie. I said everything would be okay, and it is._ ”  
> Elena: " _This? This is not okay._ ”  
> Darcy: " _This will also heal. I’ll be all right. How’s your arm?_ ”  
> Elena: “ _It’s all right. I’ve had worse cuts from a knife than that. I’m just worried that the others will sell, if I stay here. But there is nothing we can do, until these men are caught._ ”  
> Darcy: “ _We’re working on it, Elena._ ”  
> Elena: “Mm. I say before. You are good girl.”  
> Darcy: "Not really. I’m kind of an asshole most of the time.”  
> Elena: “ _That is bullshit. You’re trying. That’s all anyone can ask. Besides, you saved my life. The man who tried to hurt me is dead, now, but you kept me safe from him. That makes you good. Don’t tell yourself anything different._ ”  
> Darcy: “This is stupid. I’ve—I have a plan, I know what I’m doing, why am I—shit.”  
> Elena: “Is okay. Karen, she tell me. _The boys have had a fight, yes? And it’s bad?_ ”  
> Darcy: “ _We’ve fought before. It’s not like we haven’t—we’ve argued. But it’s not—it was never like this. And I’m just—_ ”  
> Elena: “You’re scared. You think is your fault.”  
> Darcy: “No. I know whose fault it is. I—I kept a secret, and there’s nothing wrong in that. But—but I’m scared that it can’t be fixed. That’s what I’m scared of.”  
> Elena: “Ay. You wait here. Is yours. I saved.”  
> Darcy: "You grabbed this?”  
> Elena: " _Yes._ Your friends, they love you. I see. _They don’t blame you, whatever it is. And if they do, I will speak with them._ ”  
> Darcy: " _Foggy might die if you do that._ ”  
> Elena: “Darcy, _honey, listen to me._ What you do, I don’t know. Why those men— _why they took you, I don’t know that either._ But you are good. Their fight, is not your fault. And what you do now, _that’s good._ Do not forget. I stay here. You need help, _tell me. And when you need someone to talk to, I’m here._ ”  
> Darcy: “Thank you, Elena. _I’m sorry about your home._ ”  
> Elena: “ _I love my home. But it’s just a place._ If people get hurt, I no need. There are other places. My son, he might have idea. I check.”  
>  Darcy: “No We’ll get your place back, Elena. We’ll fix it. _We will._ ”
> 
> Darcy: " _I love you, brother._ "  
> Foggy: " _My hovercraft is full of eels._ "


	16. Seven Sins, Seven Virtues

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for: dubious consent, misogyny, date rape drugs, discussion of rape (general), discussion of rape (specifically, Kate's), discussion of assault (general and Kate's), liberal usage of tasers, panic attacks.
> 
> MY FAVORITES GET A SCENE YOU GUYS.
> 
> MY FAVORITE HOMELESS BABIES.

Daily Daze hasn’t changed all that much since undergrad: a basement club with open rafters and strobe lights that make her eyes burst in her skull. It’s only a few blocks away from Central Park, where all the tourists gather, and so the bouncers and the bartenders have crafted a fine art of letting just enough underage kids through into the alcoholic section of the bar to keep it bursting full of people no matter what time of year it is, while simultaneously letting just few enough in that if the cops find any there they can disavow all knowledge of the situation. There’s more dubstep playing than there was the last time she was here, and they’ve repainted the walls the oddest mix of red, black, blue, white, green, and purple. She doesn’t get it until she sees one of the waitresses dressed up like the Black Widow, complete with Widow’s Bite bracelets, and she realizes it must be some kind of cosplay week. It’s sheer good luck that her wig is short, red, and curly. She tugs at the waistband of her leather pants, and glances back over her shoulder at the door.

“This feels really weird,” she says, pushing between a trio of college frat boys dressed as Captain America, Dum-Dum Dugan, and Bucky Barnes respectfully, and signaling to the bartender. The communicator thing in her ear is itchy. “Do you think the Avengers know that clubs in the city have cosplay nights for them?”

“I don’t know if that’s the point,” Matt says. She nearly jumps every time he says something, because it sounds like he’s right next to her, even though she knows for a fact he’s waiting in the alley behind Daily Daze. “Besides, they’re a bit busy saving the world.”

“They’d do better to look in their own backyards,” says Darcy, and smiles at the bartender. It’s a woman tonight, wearing a clinging purple shirt. She has arrowheads dangling from her earlobes. Darcy can’t remember her from the interviews she did with the Daily Daze staff who’d been there the night Kate was raped, which is only to the good. If someone recognizes her, she’s kind of screwed. “Can I just get some vodka, please. No tonic, just straight.”

“Drinking alone?” says the bartender, and in her ear, Matt laughs.

“You could say that,” Darcy says, and smiles until the bartender leaves. Then she scowls. “I don’t know where the fuck you found these things, but this is fucking _creepy_ , Matt.”

“I told you, I ordered in bulk. They added in a few bonuses. This one was kind of shit, though. It wouldn’t work if I weren’t the one using it. Yours only receives, it doesn’t transmit.”

“Thank God for small favors,” she says, and turns on her stool to look at the crowd. A guy dressed as Thor (he can’t be more than sixteen, so he must have used ‘roids of some sort to get his deltoids that large) slows as he walks by, and gives her a sweeping top-to-toe look that reminds her of someone sizing up meat. Darcy rolls her eyes, and turns her back on the crowd. “Trust me to pick the worst person to dress up as on Avengers night. I should have been the Hulk.”

“Lynch and Jenson are here,” Matt says, and she stills. The lady!Hawkeye bartender drops off her drink, and sweeps away to the other end of the bar. “Back of the club. Goodman’s not with them.”

“How do you know?”

“They’re on the phone with him right now.” Matt stops for a moment. “Talking about their next shipment.”

“Good, because Goodman’s met me, and he’ll smell me out.” She gulps down half her drink at once, and grits her teeth to keep herself from choking. “The guy’s a dick, but I’m pretty sure he’d remember the attorney who filed a suit against him.”

Matt’s quiet.

“Matt?”

“There’s a girl with them. She’s drunk.”

 _Oh, great._ “You’re joking,” she says, and finishes her drink before slipping off the bar stool and sliding through the crowd. “Do you think they’ve roofied her?”

“Possibly. She’s slurring her words a lot.” Matt’s slipping into the Vigilante voice, which could be a good thing at the moment. She’ll feel better if she doesn’t think that it’s her best friend Matt on the other end of the line. The dubstep song fades, and builds up into Lady Gaga’s Monster. She’d laugh at the aptness of it, if not for the fact that she’s pretty sure she’ll drop into hysteria the moment she starts. “There are too many people in there. I can’t make them out very well without ignoring you.”

“Ignore me for a minute, then.” She drums her fingers against her thigh, pressing her clutch close against her hip. She’s pulled the gloves she’d stolen from Matt on over her finger splints (not something she ever wants to do again) and though her sleeve is a bit bulky thanks to the cast, she looks normal enough in the dim light. “Listen to the girl. You can find me again. Don’t worry about me, I can handle myself for five minutes.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” says Matt, but it’s affectionate. Then he drops into silence. Darcy fights the urge to grab her taser, and smiles at the next guy who walks by and checks out her boobs. _Fucking slimebucket. May some enterprising soul break into your bank account and distribute it to those in need._

She knows what Mathias Lynch and Clark Jenson look like from photographs (always lock down your Facebook privacy settings, kids) but seeing them in person is a bit different than reading their faces in digital photos. They’re both white, surprise, surprise, though Clark Jenson has dreads in his hair, like he’s either trying to be Bob Marley or thinks it works on him. It really doesn’t. She has yet to meet a white boy who can pull off dreads, to be totally honest. Lynch is whip thin, with a shaved head and a tattoo of something that looks like a skull laced with flowers on the side of his throat. Darcy drops down into an empty chair about ten feet from them, crossing her legs and propping her chin in her hand, elbow on the counter. The girl’s sitting between Lynch and Jenson, tipping a little. Darcy can’t make out her face, but she looks young. A college freshman, maybe. It looks like she’s dressed as a crossplaying Bruce Banner. _Great_.

“I’m pretty sure she’s drugged,” Matt says all of a sudden. She’s very glad she’s not carrying a drink, because she would have slopped it all down the front of herself. “Or someone in her immediate vicinity is drugged, anyway. I can smell it in one of the drinks.”

“Where are you?”

“Other side of the wall. Gimme a minute.” There’s a small window set high into the wall behind Lynch and Jenson’s couch. She thinks she sees someone standing just beside it, but in the next instant, they’re gone. “Yeah. She’s drugged. She’s gonna be completely out of it in a few minutes.”

“We have to get her out of there.”

“Careful. There’s a camera that’s centered right on that couch. Keep your back to the entrance when you go over there.”

Darcy nods once, and masks it by tugging the hair of her wig back out of her face. There’s another Black Widow a few seats down, the front zipper of her jumpsuit pulled very low to show off a fresh tattoo on the inside of her left breast. She gives Darcy a look, and then harrumphs away. Darcy snorts. “Don’t you miss the club scene?”

“There’s a reason why I never wanted to go with you guys.” She touches her wig, and then her cheeks (she’s layered enough make-up on to make sure that her actual face is almost completely unrecognizable, especially once the swelling from the bruises goes down, but there’s still a flutter of terror in her stomach that this might actually get her disbarred) before standing, rocking into her shoes to catch her balance. “These places make my head spin.”

She thinks about what it would be like to go into a club with senses like Matt’s, and winces. “Oh, Jesus. I’m so sorry.”

“I never told you. Don’t worry about it.” The music shifts again, from Lady Gaga to Ke$ha, and hey, the music in clubs hasn’t changed all that much in five years. She doesn’t feel quite so terribly old. “Wait. Someone’s coming.”

It’s the bouncer. He bends down and says something into Lynch’s ear (that settles the question as to which of the two takes the lead, when Goodman’s not there) and then vanishes back into the crowd. Lynch and Jenson talk quietly amongst themselves for a minute or two. Then Jenson gets up, hooking the girl’s arm around his waist and tucking his own around her shoulders. She can’t quite put her feet down right. Her wig’s tousled, strands of platinum blonde hair escaping to brush her jawline, and she has sharp cheekbones underneath the scientist glasses. Darcy licks her lips. “Matt, I think they’re taking her out of here.”

“They’re passing her off,” Matt says. “Goodman’s waiting in a car down the block. They’re grabbing girls for him.”

Her stomach churns. She wants to shoot something. Darcy gets to her feet, fluffing her hair out one more time. She can feel it the moment Lynch’s eyes fall on her, a creeping chill up the back of her neck. Lynch crooks his finger at her, and Darcy turns her face just enough that he won’t be able to see her lips moving. “Lynch wants me to come over.”

Matt doesn’t say anything. Darcy makes herself smile, and dips her hand into her purse. Her banana phone might not be able to make calls or send texts anymore (it receives, at least; she’d tested it, back in Matt’s apartment) but the voice recording app that she’d downloaded after Wesley had threatened to kill her the first time, that still works. (The first time. Jesus. Her life.) She hits the record button without looking, and comes to a stop in front of Lynch’s couch. “If you’re not buying me a drink, I’m moving on.”

Lynch signals at a nearby waitress (wearing Hulk-fists and looking very unhappy about it) and looks at her through heavy lidded eyes. His eyelashes are so fine they’re almost transparent, and his pupils are huge. It looks like he’s been sampling his own product. “A drink for the lady,” he says to the waitress, and the waitress irritably turns to Darcy.

“Strawberry daiquiri,” she says, which is pretty much the only thing in the world she’s guaranteed not to drink. She’d swell up like a balloon if she tried it, so there’s no way Lynch or Jenson can drug her without her realizing it. “Please.”

The girl doesn’t soften at all at the _please,_ but she also doesn’t swear at them as she leaves, which Darcy thinks is probably an improvement.

Darcy perches on the edge of Lynch’s couch, just looking at him. He’s definitely been drinking, in addition to whatever shit he’s been shooting up; she can smell it on his breath when he leans forward to study her face. She’s very glad, all of a sudden, that the strobe lighting is so strong. The flashing colors will make it impossible for him to make out the color of her eyes, or the shape of her jaw. Especially if he’s as wasted as he smells. “So,” he says, and she shifts her hair to cover the little waxy bulb of the receiver in her ear. “What’s a girl like you doing in a shithole like this?”

She nearly laughs, because you have to be fucking shitting me. _That’s_ the line he goes with? “Nostalgia,” she says. “I came here a lot a few years ago. I don’t have as much time, now.”

“Finals?” says Lynch knowingly, and his eyes drop to her leather pants before sliding back up to her face. She clenches the fingers of her good hand into a knot on her knee.

“It’s October. So, no. Also, I finished school.”

“Hey, I finish this year.” _Wait, that means—okay. So you’re just phenomenally stupid._ She’s not sure why she’s surprised by that. “What did you take, English lit?”

She bares her teeth in an approximation of a smile. “Criminal justice, actually.”

“That’s cool.” He curls a strand of her wig around his fingers. There’s an X tattoed into the web of skin between his thumb and index finger. She wonders what it’s supposed to mean. “Seems kind of deep, for a girl as pretty as you. Though you do pull off one hell of a Widow. Damn.”

“This was just something I had floating around.”

“Hell of a something,” he says, his eyes not leaving her boobs. To hell with him recognizing him in court. She’s beginning to think he wouldn’t be able to pick her face out of a crowd five minutes from now. He’s like the poster child of Straight White Boys Texting. “What’s your name, gorgeous?”

 _Gag me._ “Lilith,” she says. Foggy’s gonna shit a brick.

“Lily,” he says, and she has to roll her eyes. Lynch doesn’t notice. “Like Lily Potter, haha. And a redhead, too. Jesus, it’s like a fucking picture book.”

 _Oh, you are not going to ruin Lily Potter for me, dude._ “ _Lilith_ ,” Darcy repeats, and he blinks at her once or twice before his lips part, and he nods.

“Lilith.” His eyebrows wrinkle. “Like the queen of monsters?”

“My parents were Satanists,” Darcy says sweetly. Lynch seems to struggle with that concept for a moment before tossing it aside completely as too complex. God, she’s so done with stupid people. Stupid assholes. Stupid rapist drug-dealing assholes. Speaking of—she tips her head a little to bare the side of her neck, the way she would to a vampire. “I hear on the grapevine that you’re the guy to go to if a girl wants a good high. Did I hear right?”

“Hmm.” He twines her wig between his fingers again, resting his wrist on her shoulder. “Who’d you hear that from?”

“I tutor at Barnard. Picked it up from someone or other. If they’re wrong, then sorry, but thanks for the drink.” As if on cue, the girl in Hulk-fists reappears with the strawberry daiquiri. Darcy accepts it, and sets it on the table. Lynch still doesn’t seem to be fully comprehending anything she’s saying, and when she gets a good look at the inside of his elbow in a sudden flash from the strobes, she can see a fresh bruise on the skin there. _Yeah. Totally high._ “But somehow I don’t think they’re wrong.”

“No,” he says. “They’re not. What’re you gonna do for me to get it?”

“I don’t know.” She smiles. “What do you want me to do?”

“Christ, you’re sexy,” says Lynch, and she throws up in her mouth a little. She hears a scuffle and a thump from Matt’s end of the line, and then nothing. She assumes it was Jenson. “Rich’d love you.”

 _I can promise you that he really, really wouldn’t._ “So?” She rests one fingertip against the inside of his wrist. “What do you say we take this outside?”

She’d be really, truly, phenomenally depressed about the state of her generation if not for the way Matt is choking on laughter on the other end of her communicators, or whatever the fuck these are called. Why the hell he thinks it’s so funny she has no idea, but she’s glad somebody’s amused about the whole thing, because she certainly isn’t. Lynch nods a few times, his eyes wide, and she stands, leaving her daiquiri behind. It’s on Lynch’s tab anyway. Her mask is outside with Matt, but her taser’s pressed close against her hip through her clutch as Darcy takes Lynch’s hand (it’s sweaty and shaped wrong to fit comfortably with hers, which is good, because her skin is already crawling) and tugs him back into the crowd. “The girl’s unconscious,” Matt says in her ear. “She’s safe.”

She feels something brush against her ass, and she’s really not sure if it’s a hand or something else. She ignores it.

“When you come out, turn left and go down the side alley. Keep walking. There’s a turn-off about fifty feet down that’ll put you out of sight of the bouncers.”

“’kay,” she says, in a low voice so Lynch won’t hear it. She thinks for a minute that Matt doesn’t hear it either, but then he hums again, something deep and dark and pleased that makes her blood curl.

“No wonder Wesley’s scared of you.”

The idea of James Wesley being scared of her is almost inconceivable ( _I do not think that word means what you think it means)_ , considering how absolutely terrified she is of him, but if anyone’s going to know who Wesley’s scared of, it would be Matt. She files away that thought in the back of her mind to ask later, and tugs Lynch up the stairs. “This way,” she says, careful to keep the Atlanta accent in her voice. “I know a place.”

“I’ll be back,” he says to his bouncer friend, and Darcy keeps her face turned towards Lynch as the bouncer checks her out carefully. He’s the one who might be the problem, if it comes down to it. Of course, his eyes settle on her boobs, and the tension in her spine slowly leaks away.

“I expect you will,” says the bouncer to Lynch, and she’s seriously just going to take a bath for like…hours. She feels tainted.

Lynch doesn’t let go of her hand as she pulls him down the alley. He does start creeping up behind her, his other hand tracing down her back, over the top of her ass. She bites the swollen part of her cheek to keep herself from screaming. “Where you takin’ me, baby?”

“Somewhere private,” she says, and it’s almost a growl. _Touch me again and you lose your hand._ “It’s this way.”

There’s the turn-off Matt mentioned, fifty feet down and to the right. She can see Jenson’s feet sticking out from behind a pile of cardboard boxes. Lynch doesn’t notice; he passes her and turns, reaching out with both hands to grip her by the shoulders, and she turns her face away before he can lay a sloppy kiss on her mouth. “Thought you said you’d do anything,” he says, a warning low in his voice. Darcy smiles wide, and closes her good hand over the taser, drawing it out of her clutch.

“So will you,” she says, and jabs it hard into his ribs.

Something vicious and snarling and _real_ roars in her chest when she hears the crackle of the static. Lynch goes absolutely stiff, twitching with the force of the volts, and she pulls the trigger again, just to be an asshole, before stepping away from him and letting him fall. His eyes are rolling back into his head when he hits the ground, and she glances back over her shoulder—she can’t see the bouncer—before stepping over his jerking body. The girl’s on the far side of the pile of cardboard, her eyelashes fluttering. She’s ghost-pale and beautiful, even with her glasses dangling halfway off her face. She can’t be more than eighteen. Darcy stops the recording on her phone, and then crouches, fixing the girl’s glasses (they’re probably fake, but whatever) before popping the comm thing out of her ear. “So. Okay?”

“You scare me,” says Matt from the fire escape. He swings down, and then puts a hand to his ribs. When she scowls at him, Matt ignores it. “But it’s a good kind of scary.”

“It better be.” She touches the girl’s cheek, and then stands. “We should get her out of here. I don’t know where to take her, though.”

“She won’t wake up for at least another four hours. There’s time to figure that out.” Matt’s dropped entirely into the Vigilante voice. Darcy clears her throat. “Lynch will snap out of it soon, though. You should probably be gone by then.”

“Uh-uh. My case, my fight.” She grabs her bag from where it’s lying next to the girl, and pulls the mask out, hooking it over her wig. It’s not difficult to see through it, exactly, but she’s glad she’s wearing contacts, that’s all she has to say about it. Matt doesn’t say anything as she turns back to Lynch, and goes through his pockets with her gloved hands. There are a bunch of little white packets marked with a curving snake, which she assumes are his product; she shoves two into her clutch and keeps going. There’s his phone, unlocked; an iPod, new, which she takes and feels no shame about it; and a pack of cigarettes, which she doesn’t bother with. “Where are we taking them?”

“In here.” There’s a half-open door with a broken lock that leads into an empty café, the kitchen shining and chrome and utterly empty. Matt nudges it all the way open with his foot, and Darcy heaves the girl up, dragging her arm over her shoulder. She’s sheer dead weight, but after staggering a few times, she gets the girl inside and into a pantry full of dry goods. She doesn’t want her to hear or see anything that might wake her up and scare her. Together, Darcy and Matt get Lynch and Jenson into the main body of the kitchen, dumping them both on the floor. It’s hell on Darcy’s wrist, and it can’t be much better for his stitches, but she keeps her mouth shut, kicking the door closed behind them. Now, at least, if the bouncer comes looking, there’ll be nothing and no one to be found.

“How did your talk go?” Matt says in a careful voice, when Darcy goes to check on the girl again. Darcy glances at him over her shoulder before creaking back to her feet.

“What, at the bar? It went okay, I think. I wouldn’t suggest you trying it yet.” Matt’s probably already searched Jenson, but she does it too; his phone has a passcode to it, but when she tries 0000 it unlocks with a little chirp. The background is an obviously photoshopped image of Kanye West with a bong. _Oh, Jesus._ She goes through the recent texts (there are a lot of videos from Rich Goodman, from a private Youtube channel, she thinks) and then drops the phone into her bag. There are other videos in Lynch’s phone, from Rich. There are also names. She turns it off, and pockets that one, too. “I don’t know if I helped or not, but I like to think I did.”

“Oh.”

“This is a weird conversation to have over hostages,” says Darcy. “Let’s not have this talk right now.”

“Probably a good idea.”

The girl’s name, according to her Ohio driver’s license, is Tandy Bowen. She’s seventeen years old, though she has an expensive fake ID stuffed into the back of her wallet that says she’s twenty-two, and her phone reads seven missed calls from someone named Ty. It buzzes again in Darcy’s hand, and she hits the reject button for the moment, setting the phone close by Tandy’s head. Matt tilts his head.

“Lynch is waking up.”

“Strong little fucker.” Darcy checks her burner phone, and then stands. “So. This is your night job, huh?”

Matt’s mouth flickers into a little smile. “I guess.”

He stands as if he’s waiting for her to strike him, unsettlingly vulnerable when all she’s ever seen the devil be is pure vengeance, and she can’t help reaching out and running her gloved fingertips down his arm. There are a thousand things she wants to say— _this doesn’t scare me; I’m not going to run; I want this; don’t worry_ —but all she can really manage is, “We’re big goddamn heroes. And I want to tase Jenson, too, so let’s get out there before he wakes up.”

His lips twitch again, and he hooks his fingers through hers for a moment before steadying. If this is codependency, then she’s not entirely sure she dislikes it. “Big goddamn heroes,” he repeats, and she nods once. Her taser lets out a little trill, almost like a comment.

Jenson may still be completely out of it, breathing slow and deep through his bloody nose, but Lynch isn’t. Despite having who knows how much alcohol in his system, and heroin, and having been tased, he’s awake, and trying very hard to get to his feet again, even though his knees keep giving out. She wonders for an instant if he’s some kind of mutant, if there’s some strain of genetics in him that makes him stronger, or more resilient. That’d just make their night. Darcy leaves the side room first, and whatever he sees— _red hair, a mask half in black, the taser_ —it makes his eyes widen and his hands lose their grip on the side of the counter. “Jesus,” he says, and scrambles away from her. “Jesus _fucking_ Christ, who the _fuck_ are you?”

It’s here again, that trembling sense of transformation she remembers from that night in Atlanta, waiting with a knife clenched in one hand and a doorknob in the other. A chrysalis. A metamorphosis. Another Darcy. She closes her eyes just for a moment, and lets it overwhelm her. When she speaks, the soft Southern vowels come to her without conscious effort, like she’s slipped back in time. Her skin burns. “I told you my name earlier. Weren’t you paying attention?”

His eyes narrow. Then they widen, and he licks his lips. There’s something powerful in the way he’s looking her, something that makes her feel flush and dark and whole. It looks like he’s frightened of her. “Lilith,” he says. “What the _fuck_. You fucking _bitch_. You fucking _tased me,_ you goddamn fat-ass crack whore, I’m going to fucking kill you—”

She hits the button on her taser, and blue sparks dust the floor. Lynch shuts up. In the same moment, she feels Matt come up behind her, ghosting his hand over the back of her shoulder. “I’d be nice to the woman if I were you,” he says, and that’s his _Don’t Fuck With Me_ voice. She knows it from Matt and she knows it from the devil, and now the two are entwining in a chrysalis of their own. “She has a temper.”

Lynch’s eyes nearly fall out of his head. “You’re him,” he says, and scrambles back, or tries to. His back rams up into the metal drawers that hold kitchen appliances instead. “You’re the devil. But you work alone, what the _fuck—_ ”

“Queen of monsters,” Darcy says, and Matt’s mouth curls up into something dangerous. She crouches down, draping her bad arm over her knee. Lynch’s eyes follow her. “We have a lot of things to talk about, I think.”

For a second, she hears Wesley in her ear. Then she shakes it off. _I’m not the same as him._ She’s not going to hurt Lynch without reason. (Well. She might hurt him a little bit. She thinks of Kate, of Kate’s banshee scream, and decides: yeah. She’s gonna hurt him a little bit. But she’s not going to _hurt_ him. There’s a difference.)

“You’re fucking crazy,” says Lynch, and then flinches when she cocks her head at him. “Keep the fuck away from me.”

“A few weeks ago you and Jenson here—” she pats Jenson’s ankle, but he doesn’t twitch “—were with Rich Goodman at Daily Daze. Selling your smack, as usual. There are probably a lot of nights like that, though, so I’ll be more specific. There was a girl, purple in her hair, tall, thin. Your good buddy Rich knew her. He hit on her. She told him to fuck off. Remember her?”

Lynch shakes his head. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“I think you do, Mathias, honey.” He’s sweating. She can see beads of it on his upper lip. “After all, a friend of hers was buying product from you at the time. And Rich, well, if I’m gonna guess, he’s not the sort of guy who takes it well when women tell him no, is he? Especially not women like Kate Bishop.”

His eyes bulge. He shakes his head. “You’re fucking crazy.”

“So Rich, he comes up with an idea.” She can see it in her mind’s eye, the three of them in the back of Daily Daze, with their drugs and their drinks and Rich Goodman’s poisonous tongue. “You wait until she leaves with her friends, and then you follow them. It’s probably not the first time the three of you have followed a girl into Central Park, is it?”

Lynch turns sheet white. “You crazy bitch,” he says. “You crazy _bitch_.”

“You helped hold her down,” she says, and her voice darkens into a husky croon. “Rich had her by the throat, but you and Jenson, you held her arms while he raped her. She was strong, stronger than any one of you, but each of you grabbed an arm and held her there. You laughed at her. You hit her. You tortured her as sure as anyone can torture anybody, and you _laughed while you were doing it._ ”

Lynch presses himself close up against the metal cabinets. It looks like he’s about to cry. There’s something sick and swollen inside her throat. “Don’t hurt me,” he says, and his voice cracks. “Jesus, don’t kill me.”

“ _How many times._ ” Darcy hits the button on the taser again, watching him flinch. She’s being swept away by the rage, her state of constant fury, and she’s happy to let herself go. “How many times have you ferried him girls? How many times have you drugged women like Tandy and sent them off to his penthouse? How many times have you _held women down for him_?”

“I didn’t, I didn’t, I don’t know what you’re _talking_ about—”

“He’s lying,” says the devil. Darcy doesn’t look at him. Matt’s standing with legs spread and arms crossed over his chest, and she thinks it might partly be to protect the gash in his stomach, but it’s also because of the wrath in him; she can feel it thrumming off his skin, like heat, or fire, and it’s almost like an anchor. She smiles, nearly in spite of herself.

“I know. I just wanted to see if he’d try it.”

“Jesus Christ.” Lynch licks his lips. “Fucking Christ. How do you know _any_ of this? Nobody was there, nobody knows—”

“You’d be surprised what I can find out, Mathias.” Darcy stands. She kicks his foot aside, and hunches again, closer to him, close enough that she can smell the sweat of him. He’s shaking. His fair eyelashes tremble. “How many women?”

“Oh god.” He stares at her. “Oh god. Don’t kill me.”

“ _How many women_ , Mathias?” She taps the taser against his cheek. “Shouldn’t be too hard a question to answer. Unless it is. Unless there are too many to count.”

“I just help him, okay? I don’t—I don’t fuck them, I just _help_ him. Jesus Christ, she’s going to fucking kill me.” His gaze darts past her to Matt. “She’s going to fucking _kill_ me.”

She’s an arrow, drawn back to someone’s cheek. She’s a bullet, waiting in the chamber. “I could,” she says, slowly, but then she stands, because she’s not Wesley. She’s not Fisk. “I want to. But you can help me. So I won’t.”

Lynch sags against the cabinets, and closes his eyes. She thinks he might be wetting himself. There’s a sharp, yellowy smell in the air that couldn’t be anything else.

“You’re going to turn yourself in,” Darcy says, and taps his ankle again with the toe of her shoe. He wrenches his leg away from her, pulling his knee tight against his chest. “When you wake up, you’re going to take a cab directly to the 15th Precinct. There’s a sergeant there, Brett Mahoney. You’re going to go right to him, and you’re going to lay your hands on his counter, and you’re going to say, ‘I was an accomplice in the rape and assault of Katherine Elinor Bishop.’ And you’re going to let him arrest you, and you’re going to tell him everything that you’ve done. Starting from the very first rape, and ending in tonight, with Tandy Bowen. Do you understand me?”

“Who?”

“ _Tandy Bowen_. The girl you _drugged_ and tried to cart off to Rich Goodman tonight. Her name is _Tandy Bowen._ She’s _seventeen years old_. And you drugged her and sent her off to be raped like a good little boy, because Rich Goodman gives you your heroin on the cheap. And be honest, Mathias—something in you enjoys it.” She touches the taser to his cheek again. “Tell the truth. Does it make you feel powerful, hurting women? Does it make you feel like a man? Because all it does is make you a pig.”

Lynch is crying. “You don’t know what they’ll do to me,” he says. “It’s not just Rich. There are other men, more powerful men, they’ll _kill_ me for doing it—”

“You mean Fisk,” she says, and he flinches so badly that she thinks he might gouge his cheek on a cabinet handle. “He’s going to learn that he can’t control this city. Not the way he wants to. And it’s going to start with you.”

“He’ll _kill_ me.”

“No, he won’t.” She shakes her head. “He doesn’t give a damn about you. Not about you, or Rich Goodman, or even Robbie. They don’t need you. They don’t want you. And if you keep your mouth shut about them, then they won’t kill you.” She bares her teeth under the mask. “You can’t get a promise like that from me. Now. What are you going to say to the nice sergeant?”

He gulps. “I was—I don’t know.”

“‘I was an accomplice in the rape and assault of Katherine Elinor Bishop.’”

His voice shakes. His eyes skitter to Matt again, but Matt is just _there_ , quietly implacable. “I—I was an accomplice in the rape and assault of Katherine Elinor Bishop.”

“Good boy.” She almost pats his cheek. She can’t trust him not to grab at her, though, so she doesn’t. Darcy steps back, and sets her good hand to her hip, the taser caught between her fingers like a gun. “And if Fisk’s men actually _do_ come for you, if you’re stupid enough to try and out him as what he is, well. When they come to kill you, tell them Lilith says hello.”

She fires the taser before he can say another word. The prongs stick in his chest, and the high, crackling buzz of the electricity makes her pulse jump. Lynch’s eyes roll up into the back of his head, and he sags against the countertop. She slowly releases the trigger, breathing hard as if she’s been sprinting, and tugs the used cartridge free, tossing it aside. Jenson’s still dead to the world. She kicks him in the leg as she passes, clenching her good hand into a fist and releasing. Her muscles are jumping with adrenaline and something else, something darker. She wants to run. Her brain is screaming. Matt turns his face towards her, and keeps silent. She’s not sure if the twist in his mouth is from regret, or from hard approval. It might be both.

“That,” she says, “felt _really good_.”

Matt doesn’t say anything. His jaw tightens. Then he catches her good hand, brushing the sleeve of her turtleneck back with his thumb. She blinks at him, slowly, her heart still pounding, but Matt still doesn’t speak. He lifts her wrist to his mouth, and sets his lips to the tundra swan inked into her skin.

Darcy watches him.

“Where,” he says again, words and heat and breath brushing over her wrist, “did you even _come_ from?”

She blinks. “I told you, Georgia.”

He shakes his head. Matt licks his lips, and steps closer, until she can almost feel the harsh way he’s breathing inside her own ribs. He curls towards her, around her, and she’s intoxicated. She _wants_ him, and she doesn’t know if it’s because of the adrenaline and the anger or because of how he’s _there_ , pressing up close, chest to chest and hip to hip, warped reflections in a looking glass. This isn’t Matt, she realizes. This is the devil. The same, but not. Dark and light. He touches his mouth to the inside of her wrist again, his mouth and the tip of his tongue, and _fuck_ , the bomb that goes off in her guts at that could level the city. He does it a third time, and she nearly shoves him up against the wall to do—she doesn’t even know what, fuck him or kiss him or eat him alive, right there in front of Lynch and Jenson and Tandy Bowen. But then he pulls away, and sanity, or something close to it, fades back into her. Almost. In the dry pantry, she hears the phone go off. Darcy swallows—her mouth is suddenly very dry and tacky—and then steps over Jenson to collect it. The screen says Ty again. She answers. “Hello?”

There’s a long silence from the other end. Then: “W-Who the fuck is th-this?”

“Lilith,” Darcy repeats, still trying to catch her breath, and makes herself look at Tandy Bowen. She’s curled on her side, breathing quietly. _Keep your brain working, Lewis. Pull on your big-girl pants._ “What’s your name?”

“T-Ty.” He sounds young. Frightened, though he’s trying not to show it. And angry. “What the _f-fucking hell_ are you—”

“Ty, I need you to be quiet and listen to me. Your friend was drugged at a club. I managed to get her away from the guys that did it before they could do anything, but she’s asleep and I can’t stay here with her for very long. Can you take a cab to Daily Daze?”

“H-Holy sh-shit.” Panic creeps through the phone. “Holy sh-shit, are you fucking _shitting_ me—yes, I c-can, just—I’m on m-my way there n-now.”

“You her roommate?”

There’s a long pause. “W-We d-don’t have a room.”

 _Oh, Jesus._ “You’re homeless,” Darcy says, and glances up at Matt. “Do you have somewhere to go?”

“No,” says Matt, instantly. “ _No_.”

She makes a face at him behind her mask.

“W-We h-have a p-place.” Ty’s stutter might be even worse than Jen’s was, back before Jen started taking elocution classes. Darcy pinches the bridge of her nose, and looks down at Tandy Bowen. Now that she actually has cause to see it, she can tell exactly how thin Tandy is—not supermodel skinny, but hasn’t-eaten-much-lately skinny. Her clothes are high-quality but in poor condition, and there’s a smear of dirt on the underside of her jaw. Darcy sighs. _Goddammit._ There’s nowhere else she can think to put them—Claire’s empty apartment is out, because Santino would probably freak, and there are more than enough people in her own apartment anyway, not to mention the fact that she doesn’t exactly want anybody to be able to tell who she is.

The idea dawns on her slowly, like a sunrise. “Do you know where St. Patrick’s Cathedral is?”

Ty’s quiet for a long moment. Then: “M-Maybe.”

“The priest there, Father Lantom, he’s a good man. He might not be able to do much for you, but what he can do, he will. Not saying you have to go. Just—it might be better than what you have right now.”

She hears him swallow. “Wh-Where’s T-Tandy?”

“There’s an alley between a Chinese restaurant and a pawn shop, three blocks away from Daily Daze. I’ll wait with her there. How soon can you be here?”

“T-Ten minutes.” Ty hesitates. “M-Maybe f-fifteen.”

“Fifteen minutes I can do.” She looks up at Matt again, ignoring the way her muscles are twitching. _Fight, run, dance, kill._ “She’s safe with me, Ty. I promise you.”

Ty doesn’t say anything else. With a shaky sigh, he hangs up the phone. Darcy shoves Tandy’s back into her coat pocket (the lab coat is too thin for her, especially considering the chill in the air lately) and huffs. “I know,” she says. “I’m a soft touch.”

“Not what I was thinking.”

“Well, whatever you were thinking, wait to tell me until we get her off safe?” She squeezes her unbroken hand into a fist, ignoring the throbbing in her fractured fingers. “Shit. Father P’s gonna _kill_ me for this.”

Matt doesn’t have anything to say to that. He bends down, and scoops Tandy Bowen into his arms. Darcy lets out a shocked, scared little noise—“your stitches, you idiot!”—but he just shakes his head. “Come on,” he says. “Jenson is waking up, and we should be gone by the time he snaps out of it.”

“I swear to god they both have some kind of mutation,” says Darcy, but she grabs her bag. “They should be completely out of their skulls by now.”

“I doubt the only thing they’ve been taking is heroin.” Matt heaves Tandy’s arm up across his shoulders. “I could smell mutant growth hormone on them, too. Maybe that did something.”

“Mutant growth hormone.” She shuts the door to the kitchen behind them, and then shoves a piece of PVC pipe through the door handle. “MGH _that,_ dickweasel.”

Matt’s lip twitch, but he falls quiet after that.

Ty looks about as different from Tandy as a Klingon does from a Vulcan. Where she’s slender, pale-skinned and pale-haired, he’s tall and thicker-set, with the darkest skin that Darcy’s ever seen. His white t-shirt is torn at the collar, and smeared on one side with something that looks like charcoal. He stops dead at the sight of her mask, but then he seems to steel himself, and he darts forward to run one hand through Tandy’s cropped hair, gently, even though his fingers are shaking. It reminds Darcy very strongly of Jen, how he moves around Tandy, careful and loving and _there_ , and it makes her throat hurt. Matt’s waiting half a dozen yards back and about three yards in the air, crouched on a fire escape the same way a panther will sit in a tree. Darcy crosses her arms over her chest, ignoring the twinge from her broken wrist ( _Ibuprofen when you get home, girly-girl_ ) and says, “She’s okay, Ty. Just sleeping. She’ll wake up in a few hours.”

“She c-can’t hear me.” He touches Tandy’s cheek, and then steps past her, putting himself between Tandy and Darcy. She’s very careful to keep herself from flinching. “Masks d-don’t help p-people l-like us,” he says, and that breaks her heart, the determination and the agony in his face as he says it. “W-What d-do you w-want from us?”

“Nothing.” She clenches her fingers hard into her elbow to keep herself from reaching out. “She crossed paths with some bad people tonight. I just want to make sure she’s safe. That’s all.”

He stares at her. Then his eyes flick up, and widen. He’s found Matt in his perch. “Jesus C-Christ. You’re the d-d-devil. Y-You blew up Hell’s K-Kitchen.”

“I was framed,” Matt says quietly, and drops down to the ground again. He barely makes a sound on the concrete. “For the record.”

“Th-Then—” Ty’s eyes flick back to her. “Are y-you the B-Black W-Widow?”

“No. I’m just me.”

“L-Lilith,” Ty says, and Darcy nods.

“Yeah. Close enough.”

Ty’s eyes narrow. “Th-This isn’t Hell’s K-Kitchen. Wh-What are you doing here?”

Darcy taps the heel of her shoe against the wall. “Doesn’t really matter. Take Tandy. Get her somewhere safe. She’ll probably panic when she wakes up. And if either of you need _anything_ , go to Father Patrick Lantom at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.” She smiles. “He likes people who ask deep questions.”

For a long time, Ty just _looks_ at her. Then, very slowly, he tips his head forward into a nod. “Y-Yeah,” he says. “I c-can’t—maybe. I’ll th-think about it.”

It’s not a lot, but it’s all she’s going to get. Besides, she has a feeling that even something like that is a very big deal, coming from a homeless kid. She nods once, and steps away from the wall. “Take care of each other,” she says, and then she turns to Matt, and together they walk away into the dark.

.

.

.

It’s almost two in the morning by the time they get back to Matt’s apartment, and clamber in through the fire escape. There are blisters on the balls of her feet the size of fifty cent pieces, for some reason her hair smells like fish, her head is _pounding,_ and extracting her broken hand from her glove is going to be the most painful thing in existence (well, except maybe the breaking of it in the first place) but there’s a tired sense of accomplishment hanging heavy off her limbs that reminds her of long days in the law library at Columbia, or a double-shift at the Starbucks with Zeke. She’s exhausted, but it’s for a reason, instead of just staying up all night watching Netflix. “No wonder you fall asleep at work all the time,” she says, and bites the inside of her cheek to keep herself from yawning. “I feel like fucking Aurora or some shit.”

Matt doesn’t say anything. He just drops down onto his couch (or eases his way down, in a way that makes her think he’s hurting more than he wants to say) and rests his head against the pillows, the mask dangling from two fingers. “Mm.”

“You asleep?” She peels off her second shoe, and lets out an awkward little hiss when her blistered feet touch the cold floor. “ _Shit_. Band-Aids. Band-Aids _now._ ”

He hums again. She eyes him for a moment, and then drops down onto the couch next to him, tugging the first aid kit out from underneath.

“Hey, Matt.”

“Mm?”

“I’m on fire,” she says, and peels open a Band-Aid. “Like, blue flame. Very painful.”

“Sure you are,” says Matt, without opening his eyes. She wants her contacts _out_. Darcy presses the Band-Aid over the first blister, whining high in the back of her throat when she has to push down a little to make it stick.

“Well, at least I know you’re not dying.” She heaves her other foot up onto her knee, digging around for another Band-Aid. Her wig is very itchy. “How’s the war wound?”

“Fine.” He doesn’t touch it. There’s a puffy bruise blossoming all down one side of his face, as if he’s been knocked into something hard, over and over again. It wasn’t there when she’d left the apartment that afternoon. “No busted stitches. Somehow.”

“Well, good, because I’m sick of fixing it.” She watches him out of the corner of her eye. Her mouth tastes sour, like she’s swallowed curdled milk by mistake. “Do all your jaunts usually go that easy?”

He scoffs under his breath. “Not nearly. And considering my luck, it should have been much worse.”

“Guess I’m lucky, then.” She collects the Band-Aid wrappers, and closes the first aid kit, heading for the kitchen to deal with the trash. “It really didn’t bother you the way I thought it would.”

“What didn’t bother me?”

“Me being there. And—doing what I did.” There are still little aftershocks jolting through her system like static, from the taser, from the _power_ , from the look on Matt’s face when she’d done it. “All of it. I thought—I thought it would bug you more.”

Finally, Matt opens his eyes. He turns his face towards hers. “Darcy, why would that bother me?”

She makes an impatient noise. “I don’t know. Because you were trying really fucking hard to keep me away from it, like, two days ago? And I wasn’t exactly—”

She stops. What wasn’t she? Rational? No, she’d felt rational. Like she’d been walking down the edge of a knife, too-sharp, cutting. _Sane_ might be a better word. Or _human._

“Nice,” she says, eventually. “I wasn’t exactly nice.”

He considers that. Then Matt shifts on the couch. “Come here,” he says, and Darcy creeps out of the kitchen and back into the living room, coming to a stop just beside the couch. Matt lifts her broken hand in both of his, and starts tugging the glove off, millimeter by millimeter, as gently as he can. _He shouldn’t be able to do that_ , she thinks. Have hands that are cruel that can also be so, so careful. For the first time since the start of this, she thinks she might be seeing them both at once, Matt and the devil in one. Two halves of one creature. Like Gabriel, maybe. And Lucifer. She grits her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut until her hand is free again. “You shouldn’t have worn this,” he says, after a moment. “Your fingers are swollen.”

“They’re gonna be swollen for a while anyway. And I didn’t want to leave prints.”

“Mm.” He lifts her other hand, and peels the glove off. He doesn’t let go of her, though. His fingers are warm where they tangle with hers. “You’re right. I don’t think you should come with me again, not until you can fight. Until you can protect yourself. But—but it wasn’t bad, having you there. It’s—” He searches for a word. “I don’t want you to get hurt, but if you’re there, I can keep you as safe as I can. And it’s…” Matt’s mouth folds, strangely. “Three days ago I would have said no. I wouldn’t want you there. I wouldn’t want you to turn into me. But it’s different, now.”

“Because I’m different?”

He shakes his head once. “Because I think I finally know all of you, and it doesn’t scare me the way it would have before.”

She flinches, and nearly pulls her hand away. “Oh.”

“Shit, no. That’s not what I meant.” He sighs, sharp and quick, through his nose. “You think it frightened me. What you did.”

“Not—not exactly.” She can remember the way his lips had felt against her wrist. It’s distracting. “More like—it’s a part of me that I don’t—I don’t like showing it. I _don’t_.”

His hand tightens around hers. “Like a monster,” he says. “Clawing out of you. Like a demon.”

“Not anymore.” She shakes her head. She’s never talked about this. Not with anyone. But she’d told Matt about Eli, showed him the ugliest, cruelest part of herself. Maybe he can hear this, too. “Maybe—maybe before, when Eli was killed, it was like that. Now it’s—I don’t know. It never leaves. I’m never not—I’m _never_ not angry, Matt. It’s always there, choking me. I can—I can hide it, and I _do_ , but it’s—it’s always there. And I look at the world, I look what’s been done to it, to people like Kate and that girl tonight, Tandy, and I feel it. All through me. And when—when I let it out, it’s like—“

Matt lifts her knuckles to his lips. Then her fingertips. His mouth is just a little damp, like old rainfall on a hot day. She’s never seen him so tactile. She’s never seen him do this, not like—it’s as if he’s worshipping her. She doesn’t know what to think of it. “Seeing you angry doesn’t scare me, Darcy,” says Matt, and the words seem to crawl inside her and roost there, a dark, hovering crow. “You have _never_ scared me. What I meant—earlier, I meant I would have been frightened _for_ you. But I don’t think I would be anymore.” His mouth quirks. “Well, not the way I would have been, anyway.”

“Yeah, well. It didn’t scare me then, in the middle of it, but it—it scares me now, a little.” More than a little. Her heart’s trembling in her throat. “I don’t know what I could do, if I let that loose again. I don’t know what I’ll _do_.”

“I know what you’ll do.” Matt sets his free hand on her hip. “You’ll do the right thing. Like you did with Tandy and Ty, tonight. You gave them a chance. You could have hurt Lynch, and I wouldn’t have stopped you, because the bastard needs hurting, but you didn’t. You scared the shit out of him, and you did it for Kate. And for you. You kept your head, even when you let the monster out.”

“The monster.” She tastes the words on her tongue. “What do you do when the monster is you?”

Matt shakes his head once. “I’m not the best person to ask.”

Darcy pulls her hand from his, and threads her fingers through his hair. She likes doing it, she’s found. He always leans into the touch the way an alley cat would, half-shying away, half-begging for it. It’s no different now. His hands coast down her ribs to her hips, one thumb rubbing slow circles against the fabric of her turtleneck.

“It really doesn’t bother you.”

“No.” Matt curls his fingers into the back of her hip. “No. It’s as if—” But then he stops, because whatever he’s trying to say, he can’t quite voice it. That, at least, she understands.

“Yeah,” she breathes. “Yeah. I know.”

Like a recognition, she thinks, as she bends down and kisses his temple. Like they’ve found something in each other that matches, that snarls. A knowing, and an understanding. She thinks she hears him saying it, even if his lips don’t move. Matt turns his face into hers and kisses her, and the slow-burning fire in her muscles roars back to life. She digs her fingernails into his scalp and leans into him, pushing him back into the cushions. _Yes_. There’s a monster in her blood, and it’s howling. _Yes_ and _this_ and _mine_ , and when she clambers forward onto the couch, straddling his lap, Matt’s hands slip under the seam of her shirt and up her back, his long fingers stroking the skin under the strap of her bra. _Mine_ , she thinks again, and bites his lower lip. Matt makes a soft growling sound against her mouth and presses up into her with his hands, pushing and pulling at once. _Mine._

Darcy draws back just enough to choke, and Matt drops his mouth to the skin of her throat, scraping at the tendons there with his teeth. The muscles in her thighs are shaking. “Your stitches,” she says, pushing at his shoulder, just a little. “Not with your stitches.”

“Fuck my stitches,” says Matt in a voice like shadow. He nips her collarbone. She laughs, breathless.

“Really would rather not fuck your stitches, Matthew.”

“That was terrible,” he says, and then they’re kissing again, and when she digs her nails in and curls her tongue around his the world fades. She’s hyperaware of every touch, of the way his fingertips keep seeking out the sensitive places in her skin without faltering, like he knows where they are on instinct. Darcy tugs uselessly at his shirt with her one good hand, and Matt breaks away from her just long enough to yank it up over his head and throw it aside before he goes back to her mouth, and yeah, okay, she’s way more than alright with the way his fingers keep dipping below the waistband of her leggings, and she _loves_ how he doesn’t shy away when she uses her teeth, how he matches her, because nobody’s ever done that, nobody’s just let her _want_ —

“ _Hey, it’s Karen, pick up your phone before I wreck your coffee collection. Hey, it’s Karen—_ ”

“No,” says Darcy against Matt’s mouth, and fights the urge to throw a pillow at the banana phone. “ _No_.”

“She might need something,” Matt says, but he’s still tracing his lips down the side of her throat and his hands over her ribcage, which is _so not helpful right now._ “It might be important.”

“Important like your stitches are important?”

“Darcy,” he says, and it rumbles through her bones. _Darcy_. “Answer the phone.”

She clambers off him (Matt drops his head back to the cushions and squeezes his eyes shut) and yanks her wig and wig cap off as she fumbles for the banana phone. It’s a miracle the thing will still even accept calls, considering how busted it looks. She hits the accept button (three times, because the sensor won’t acknowledge) and then says, “Karen, honey, I love you, but _what_.”

Nothing. Silence. Her lungs squeeze.

“Karen?”

“Oh, god,” says Karen. Her voice breaks. “Oh, god. I shouldn’t have called you, I’m sorry, I’m—”

“You stay on the line,” Darcy snaps, and Karen stops talking. Her breathing’s coming fast and harsh through the spotty connection. “Karen, what happened? Are you okay?”

“He’s dead,” Karen says, and on the couch Matt comes to attention in an instant, lips pressed tight together. “I just—oh, _god_.”

“Honey, where are you?” Darcy presses the phone between her ear and her shoulder, and heads for her shoes. “I’m going to come find you, okay? Where are you?”

“I’m, um, at the river. I—I don’t know what to do. Darcy, I don’t know what to _do_.” She’s crying, and that more than anything frightens Darcy. Karen doesn’t cry. Karen hadn’t even cried when talking about the night she’d nearly been murdered. Karen _doesn’t cry_ , and whatever this is, it’s bad enough that Karen’s sobbing, near hysteria. Her skin prickles like she’s been doused with ice water.

“I’m going to come meet you. Where should I meet you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I just—I don’t know what to do. And you said—” she swallows. “You said I could always call. And Darcy, I can’t do this alone.”

“Karen, honey, listen to me. I’m going to go to the office, okay? Will you meet me there? No stops, just come straight to the office. All right? Meet me there in twenty minutes.”

“I don’t—I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get there. Um. There’s—I think I can catch a cab, but—”

“Half an hour. Any later and I’ll smack you.” Karen doesn’t laugh. Darcy swallows. “The office. Thirty minutes. Karen, tell me where you’re going.”

“The office,” Karen repeats. “Thirty minutes.”

“I’ll meet you there, okay?”

“Yeah.” Karen swallows. “Yeah. Okay.”

She hangs up. Darcy listens to the silence for a moment or two, and then closes her eyes. She breathes sharp and fast through her nose, because otherwise she’s going to cry. First Foggy, and then Kate, and now Karen. _God, what’s happening to us?_ Every time she thinks something’s fixed it starts to break again, and she can’t handle it if this keeps happening. She _can’t_.

“What the hell was that?” says Matt.

“I don’t know,” she says, and curls in on herself. “But I’m going to find out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Karen, bb, you gon' be okay. 
> 
> QUERY TO ALL OF YOU: If Darcy had a superhero name, what would it be? I want your ideas~ Names already on the table as possibilities are:  
> >Angel  
> >Angel of Mercy ("Mercy" for short)  
> >Archangel  
> >Lilith (obviously)  
> >Persephone  
> >Seraph  
> >Sin  
> >Spark


	17. Bloody, Bold, and Resolute

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from _Macbeth,_ as shown:
> 
>  
> 
> _Be_ **bloody, bold, and resolute** ; laugh to scorn  
> The power of man, for none of woman born  
> Shall harm Macbeth.
> 
>  
> 
> OKAY GUYS YOU NEED TO LISTEN TO "IF MY HOUSE WAS BURNING" BY CHARLOTTE OC BEST KAREN SONG I HAVE FOUND YET. (I may or may not be building a Karen Page fanmix because she is my darling my baby my bae my honey my boo and my milk and honey goddess.) 
> 
> Trigger warning for: discussion of rape culture, discussion of Islamophobic/Sikhphobic culture, allusions to the attacks on Sikhs in the days immediately post 9/11, blood, guns, attempted murder, actual murder, hospitals, syringes, kidnapping and assault, panic attacks, screaming fights, moral ambiguity, and intentional run-on sentences. 
> 
> And yes okay I know I promised some Fisk but he was being shy and vengeful so have some Vanessa instead.

The flicker of streetlamps on the backs of her eyelids makes her feel as though it’s all a dream, and telling herself that it’s true is probably the only reason she doesn’t lose her mind.

Karen leans hard into the door of the taxi, resting her forehead against the cool glass. It’s a gypsy cab, the only sort of cab that’d come near the docks this time of night; the backseat smells like cigarettes and there’s a big tear in the fabric of the seat, but the driver (a young, attractive Sikh with bottle-cap glasses) had been genuinely concerned for her. It’s the first time she’s ever had a cab driver do more than grunt at her or bitch about baseball scores. The picture ID hanging from his rear view mirror says his name is Ajeet Singh. He’s doing a truly remarkable job at exuding worry without ever actually saying anything, and she’s grateful for that, she really is. Still, most gypsy cabs are illegal, and that’s why she picked this one. Ajeet had been the youngest of the drivers around, and the skinniest, the person she could overpower if it came right down to it—exactly the sort of driver who can’t report her to the police unless he wants to get arrested himself.

( _—the gun weighs heavy in her hands but she knows the weight of it, knows the heft, the only familiar thing in this moonscape of a warehouse, and he does well to hide it but she knows she can see fear in his eyes when she pulls back the hammer and says “do you really think this is the first time”—_ )

Her head hurts. Every time light and shadow flicker over her hands, she thinks she sees them bloody again. Danny’s blood or James Wesley’s, it doesn’t matter. There’s blood on her wrists, under her fingernails. She scrubs her palms against her skirt and closes her eyes again. _Breathe. Come on, Karen, breathe. It’s a dream. Breathe._

( _—do you really think this is the first time—_ )

The whole thing feels like a nightmare, skittering along the edges of her mind the way a cockroach clings close to a wall. Her bones scrape together when she moves. Her jaw aches. She’d hit the stairs hard, when Wesley had grabbed her. (She knows it was him, now. She knows the terrain of his hands like she knows the stretch marks on her thighs, a growth spurt in high school that had left its evidence behind. “A weed to willow,” her mother had said, patting her cheek, and Karen had bitched so goddamn much about the growing pains she’d barely even noticed the tremor in her mother’s hand. Her mind skips from present to past and back again, because that’s easier than looking the truth in the face.) Her pantyhose are torn, her knees are bloody and bruised, and there are marks deep in her palms where the edge of the stairs had caught against her skin. The cut from the night of the bombings is still puckered and pink on the heel of her hand. (You can read the story of her life in the marks on her body and she’s not sure how she feels about that other than resigned.) The spot on the side of her throat where he’d jammed the syringe (and who the fuck knows what he’d given her?) is puffy to the touch, and she avoids doing it.

“I’d contemplated chloroform,” he’d told her, as she’d been coming out of it. “But really, I’m done with having you people surprise me. With your track record you would have been some sort of mutant, and that would have just made my night.” There’s a bruise on her forehead from where she’d hit the stairs up to Darcy and Jen’s, and she knows she heard Elena singing a soft, lilting hymn behind the doorway as Wesley heaved her up into his arms and carried her away. He’d thrown it in her face, later. “Elena Cardenas in your apartment,” he’d said, as if to tell her, _look, look at all the things we can do to hurt you, all wrapped up for us in one place_. “Elena Cardenas and Jennifer Walters. So many people that you care about, Miss Page. Truly, it’s a testament to the sort of person that you are, that you manage to get so many on your side in so short a time.”

(— _the feel of the trigger under her forefinger as she pulled it, once, twice, three, four, and every time is like watching a bomb go off inside his chest, blood flickering in the dim light, a little grenade inside the flesh of his torso, and I dunno, do you really think this is the first time—)_

She’s very cold, even with the heater on full blast and her clothes finally free of the endless damp. She makes herself think about her breathing, the tug and loose of oxygen in her lungs. She can taste garbage in the air, garbage and car smog and humanity, the stench of the cigarettes embedded into every part of this cab (does Ajeet smoke or someone else?) (— _the crush of unwashed garbage stacked on the sidewalks, the air that seems to adhere to your skin, a layer of filth you can never completely wash away—_ ) (—and James Wesley is going to be her filth, that mark she’s never going to be able to free herself of, Lady Macbeth’s damned spot—) and it makes her think of the city as its own living thing, an ecosystem of metal and concrete, trash and human waste of every sort pumping through its corrugated cardboard veins. _Mr. Fisk loves this city_ , Wesley had said, but she’s still not sure if she does. She’s killed for it, but she’s not sure if she loves it.

(— _but you won’t be the first to die, Miss Page, no. No, I think—I think Mr. Urich will have that honor. And then we’ll go to your place of employment, see to Mr. Nelson, Miss Lewis, Mr. Murdock—a pity they all have to die, but they’ve already made it perfectly clear on which side they stand, how much you’ve corrupted them for anything better. Then, after that, I think we’ll be paying a visit to your home, see to Miss Walters, Mrs. Cardenas. And after that, anyone you have left to you, your friends, your family, anyone you’ve ever cared for, Miss Page, they’ll all die, and finally when you have absolutely nothing left to you, we’ll come for you, and you’ll be begging for us to kill you before we slit your throat—_ )

She doesn’t love the city. She hasn’t been here long enough. But she loves _places_ in it, the places that mean something to her, she loves those. Karen loves the office and the apartment and Josie’s, as skeezy and terrible as it is. She loves Mrs. Cardenas’s home, even when it’s wrecked, because she can see the love that’s been poured into that place even when you have to turn your coat collar up to ignore the local drug dealers in order to get into it. She loves Matt’s apartment even with that fucking billboard and she loves Foggy’s living room with the bookshelves that are full to bursting. She loves the fold-out couch she’s used for the past few months, loves Darla lying on her chest in the middle of the night with her eyes half-closed and her teeth poised to find flesh, loves waking up to find Jen in the kitchen making coffee with her hair up in a messy bun like she’s never gone to sleep. She loves coming back to that place and finding Darcy on the corner of the couch with ice cream or a computer or a book and that when Karen sits down on the other end of the couch she scoots over to rest her head against Karen’s knee without even thinking about it, because to her that sort of touch means nothing when in reality that sort of acceptance and easy affection and companionship means everything.

She realizes that maybe it’s not the places she loves, but the people in them. Josie and Elena and Kate, Jen and Darla perched on her lap, Matt and Foggy and Darcy, those are her people. _Her_ people, the only good things that she’s had since coming to this fucking city, and (— _they’ve already made it perfectly clear on which side they stand_ —) those are the people she’ll stay for, that she’ll fight for.

(— _think this is the first time I’ve_ —)

In the front seat, Ajeet Singh clears his throat. Karen jolts away from the door as if someone’s put a bullet in her (— _she sees it again, the way the bullets strike home, the physics of it, how he moves, how it makes him twitch_ —) and when she finds his eyes in the rear view mirror, Ajeet looks like he wants to kick himself. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No, it’s—it’s fine.” She wipes her eyes (and when did that even start? She can’t remember) and clears her throat. “What is it?”

“We’re here,” he says, and when she looks out the window she sees the restaurant and the pokey little door in the brick that leads up to Nelson, Murdock & Lewis. Karen closes her eyes and fights the urge to cross herself (an old habit from her parents, who’d never been quite sure what sort of religious denomination they’d fallen under).

“Sorry,” she says. “Um. How much do I owe you?”

Ajeet shakes his head. “No.” His voice is very soft. He sounds like he’s from Queens, or Brooklyn. (She doesn’t even know how to tell those apart, doesn’t try.) “Just—do me a favor?”

Her mouth turns tacky and in spite of everything she’s done tonight ( _—the first time I’ve shot_ —) her first instinct at hearing something like that, something so open-ended from a person she’s already labeled as a non-threat, is terrifying. “Um.”

“Oh god, no, not—nothing like that.” She thinks he might be blushing, but it’s too dark outside to tell. “Just—uh.” He digs through a backpack in the front seat, pulls out a notebook (is he a college student? He doesn’t seem quite that young) and scribbles a few things down on a blank page before tearing it free, and turning in his seat to hand the paper to her. “It’s—I know it’s weird,” he says, and Karen meets his eyes dead on, because she’ll give people that courtesy even if other people don’t do it to her, even if she’s the only one, sometimes, who will look anyone in the face. “But—yeah. It seems like—it seems like you’re having a hard time, and if you need—you know.”

“If I need a ride,” Karen says, slowly. There’s something inside her that stings like an ember on bare skin. His eyes crinkle at the corners.

“Yeah, sure. If you need a ride somewhere. Because to be honest, you are not the sort of person I would have expected to find wandering around the docks at two in the morning. So yeah. If you need something, just, y’know. If I can do anything to help.”

She looks at the paper. There’s a little smiley face at the bottom of it, and her eyes ache in her skull to look at it. Karen folds it up, and tucks the paper into her wallet, adding it to the sleeve where she keeps all of her important cards and knickknacks. Ajeet gives her a shy smile, and she makes herself smile back. She doesn’t even want to consider what it looks like.

“Yeah,” she says. “If—If I need a ride, I’ll call you.”

“Good,” says Ajeet. “This city can be dangerous, y’know? Better to have allies than enemies.”

She’s not sure why that hits her so hard, but it does. It knocks the wind out of her. Karen musters up a shaky little smile, and then opens the door to the gypsy cab, clambering out into the street. She already knows she’s not going to call him—he doesn’t deserve to get mixed up with someone like her, this guy who’s so strikingly kind even in the face of all the shit he must go through being a turbaned brown-skinned man in a city like New York, where Ground Zero lingers like an open, pussy wound. He deserves better than that.

( _Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?_ )

 _This city can be dangerous_ , he’d said, and she wonders what he’d do if she tells him _yeah, and I’m one of the dangerous parts. In this city full of monsters, I’m one of the things lurking in the dark._

.

.

.

Matt’s apartment is only ten minutes away from the office, but she has her boots back on and her coat hanging over her shoulder less than a minute after Karen hangs up. It takes longer to convince Matt that he doesn’t have to come with her, that he just has to listen until she makes it to the law firm and then butt his nose out. “Karen called me,” she says. “I get that you’re worried, but she called _me_. We can’t both ambush her. She’s expecting me. And if she doesn’t want to tell you, she doesn’t have to tell you, Matt. So _back off._ ”

Matt gets creases around his mouth that he only has when he’s angry and not wanting to mention it, but he says “okay” without a whole lot of venom, and when she turns away from him he tugs her back and kisses her swiftly on the mouth, so she thinks they’re okay.

She’s also pretty sure that he’s going to try and eavesdrop, but if she pretends that’s not happening, then, whatever, it’s not happening.

The result is that by the time Karen unlocks the door to the office, Darcy has coffee made and her feet up, tapping the edge of her phone too quickly with her fingernails. She’d at least managed to get most of her make-up off (she leaves remover wipes in her desk drawer for a reason; it only takes so long before eyeliner starts making her feel like a deranged panda), but the only really comfortable way to sit in her leather pants is to keep her legs as straight as possible, which is only going to happen if she props her boots on the desk.

It makes sense in this universe, okay? She’s checked.

Karen looks like hell. That’s the first thing that Darcy notices. Like someone’s opened her up along her spine and scraped everything out of her. Her eyes are red and her fingers are shaking as she drops her purse on the floor, and rubs her hands together, like she’s trying to warm them. Her keychain jangles between her palms. “Hey,” she says, voice cracked. “Sorry I’m late.”

“No, it’s okay.” Darcy stands. Her combat boots make awkward thunking noises against the floor. “What happened, Kare?”

“Don’t want to talk about it,” says Karen thickly.

“Ben’s okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, Ben’s okay.”

Something in her unwinds. Whoever’s dead, at least it’s not Ben Urich. “Okay. You want coffee?”

“No.” She’s shaking. “Not—not really. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she says again. What else is she supposed to say? _He’s dead. I can’t do this alone._ She licks her lips. “Are you all right?”

There she goes with stupid questions again. Karen lifts one shoulder, and then lowers it. She rubs her arms, like she’s trying to get warmth back into them. “Um. I don’t—I don’t know.”

“Okay.” Darcy steps forward, slowly. When she touches Karen’s wrist, Karen flinches like she’s been struck. Darcy pulls her hand away. “Okay. You don’t have to be, if you’re not. Do you—do you want to stay here? Go back to the apartment, maybe?”

She doesn’t look injured. There’s a strange smell coming off her, sickly sweet, like rotting flowers. Karen rubs her arms again. “No,” she says. Then she swallows. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t _know_ , Darcy, okay?” She jangles her keys in her hand. Karen snatches her bag off the floor. “ _Shit._ I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have—”

“Did something happen?” Darcy asks, as Karen puts her hand on the doorknob. “With Fisk? With—with what you learned about him? Did something happen?”

Karen goes white. She’s so pale that she might actually faint, Darcy thinks, and she steps forward just in case Karen crumples to the floor. Then Karen presses her back to the wall beside the open door, propping herself up, tipping forward so that her hair hides her face. She shakes her head once, not a _no_ , just a _don’t_. “Darcy,” she says, rough. “Stop _asking_.”

“I’m the annoying supporting character. I have to ask things.”

Karen laughs once, sharp, almost a bark. “Yeah, well, sometimes asking questions gets you into a hell of a lot of shit.”

Well, that helps, a little. She wonders if Matt’s listening to this, or if he’s turned his ears off. (Can Matt turn his ears off? Questions to ask.) She swallows. “Did Fisk—did Fisk learn about it? You visiting his mom. Or about Ben?”

Karen jerks her head once, and is silent.

“Did someone else learn about it?”

She flinches. Karen drops her keys, or they slip out of her hand, Darcy’s not sure. She doesn’t bend to pick them up again. “Darcy,” she says again. “Stop _asking_.”

“They did, didn’t they?” She feels skeletal. _Why this night, of all nights? Why now, of all times?_ And: _No matter what you do, Fisk can still get them. Fisk can still come for them._ Then: _Not if I fucking kill him first._ She wants her gun back. She wants her taser in her hand. She wants blood underneath her fingernails. “They—they found out you and Ben went to see Fisk’s mom. Did they send someone after you? Did they attack you again?”

“ _Stop_ ,” Karen says, pressing her hands to her head. She sounds like broken glass, brittle and sharp. Darcy stops. This time when she reaches out, Karen shakes. She lets Darcy touch her, lets her rub warmth into her shoulders. She’s freezing cold, and Darcy’s not certain if it’s because of the weather or because of something else entirely.

“Karen. Honey.” She touches her lightly, the way she’d touch a scared animal. “You can talk to me. You know you can talk to me.”

“You’re keeping secrets,” Karen says. Her voice snaps, all frost and fire. “You and Matt and Foggy, you’re keeping a secret from me. You think I can’t tell? You think I can’t—Matt wasn’t hit by a fucking _car_ , Darcy. You think—you think you’re helping by keeping secrets from me, but you’re _not_. You’re _not_ ,” she says again, digging her nails into her skin, like she’s trying to peel the flesh away from her face. “You’re not. It doesn’t _help_ for you to lie to me when I’m supposed to fucking _trust you_.”

“Whoa, hey.” That escalated quickly. “Hey. Breathe.”

“ _Don’t fucking tell me to breathe_!”

“Okay, don’t breathe, then,” Darcy snaps, because her temper’s rising and what the fuck else is she supposed to say? Karen doesn’t notice; she clenches her hands into fists and starts to pace around the room, a tiger in a cage.  

“Something’s going on,” she says, too fast, as if she’s trying to force all the words out at once. “I know it has something to do with Fisk because it only happens when he’s involved, all of Matt’s bruises and you get that weird line between your eyebrows, it’s only been happening the past few days but it’s obvious, I can _see_ it, and Foggy knows, he has to, because he was crawling under the fucking bar at Josie’s last night like he wanted to nest there and he was so fucking sad, and I’m going to hurt _both of you_ for making him look like that, I swear to fucking god, I don’t know what you did but if I ever see him looking like that again because of you guys I’m going to _destroy you—_ ”

“I’d let you,” says Darcy, but Karen doesn’t seem to hear.

“—and all that—that bullshit about the broken walls and the Japanese car and why you didn’t go to the _fucking police_ when you were fucking _tortured_ and what happened and how you escaped and _all of it,_ Darcy, none of it makes any fucking _sense_ , and you lie to Jen about it because you want to keep her safe but I thought we were supposed to be a team, okay? That’s what I thought, that—that I was a part of the team, and we were _doing_ something, that we could trust each other, then the three of you keep this secret from me and now I feel like I should keep _this_ secret from _you_ because that’s what would be fucking _fair_ , wouldn’t it? But I can’t breathe—I can’t—I don’t—”

“Karen.”

“You’re lying to me!” Karen shouts, and her hands are fists and her whole body is torqued with it, sketched in a vicious curve like a catapult drawn back to fire. “ _Stop lying to me_!”

They just stare at each other. Darcy’s frozen. She feels pinned by the weight of Karen’s stare, the fury that’s gleaming through the cracks in the façade. It strikes her, all of a sudden, that she might never have seen the core of Karen at all. _A kitten_ , she thinks. _A tigress. A hurricane._ Then, all at once, Karen crumples. She presses her face into her hands, and begins to cry, great heaving guttural sobs that are almost screams.

“Karen?” she says, and when she draws closer, Karen turns towards her, not protecting herself anymore, just needy and frightened and loud. “Karen, honey, oh my god.”

“I did something terrible,” she says, in a voice that doesn’t sound like Karen at all. “So terrible, Darcy, I can’t—I don’t—”

“Hey.” Darcy sets a hand to Karen’s shoulder, and this time she doesn’t jump. “Hey, come here.”

Karen lunges with a strangled gasp, pressing her face into the crook of Darcy’s shoulder. Her cheeks are warm and damp, and she’s smearing make-up into Darcy’s sleeve. She howls, and Darcy’s not sure how she came to be this person, how she’s the one that people like Kate Bishop and Karen Page, the strong ones, the ones that stand tall and lead the charge, turn to when their disguise breaks down. Something whispers in her that it’s because they’re like her, Karen and Kate: they have that same fury in them, that same passionate rage, and they recognize it in each other the same way she’s found her match in Matt. That’s why they feel safe around each other, that’s why they understand, and it’s why she knows for a fact that if she needs anything, if she needs to break, she can go to any of them, Matt or Karen or Kate, because they’ll rage with her, they’ll _get_ it in a way no one else can, not Jen or Foggy or Elena or Father P, because that monster’s in them, too. It doesn’t make them lesser, Foggy, Jen, Elena, and Father P, it just makes them different. Because Kate, Karen, Matt, Darcy: _we are the things nightmares are made of._ Maybe they feed off each other, maybe they make each other worse, but they’re a tribe now, all of them, the nightmares and the daydreams. _I am theirs, they are mine._ And _that’s_ what matters.

All of it tumbles through her like an avalanche, and she presses her lips to Karen’s temple and makes soothing noises. Darcy strokes her hair, and her cheeks are wet. She’s crying. Her voice shakes. “Hey.” Karen hides her face in Darcy’s neck. She’s nothing but agony, not even sobbing anymore, her mouth open against Darcy’s shoulder, just long, thin screams muffling against Darcy’s shirt. “Hey, you’re okay. You’re okay. I’m here. You’re okay.”

Karen makes a sound that’s almost a moan, but deeper, a low, broken sound that fractures at the end. She shakes her head against Darcy’s shoulder, and digs her nails into the back of Darcy’s neck. “No,” she says, “No, no. No.”

“Karen,” Darcy says. “Karen, who’s dead?”

She shatters. Karen draws back, presses a hand tight over her mouth. She dry-heaves. Darcy doesn’t know what to do. _Karen’s the strong one_ , she thinks. _Karen keeps us on point. If Karen’s like this_ — “I killed him,” Karen says through her fingers, and Darcy winds her arms tight around Karen’s waist. She understands, now, what Jen was trying to do. _Keep her here_ , she thinks. _Keep her safe_. Karen leans into her until Darcy’s bearing almost all her weight, and Darcy lets her. “I killed him. Oh, god. I _killed_ him. He—he put the gun on the table and he thought I wouldn’t d-do it but I did, he thought I’d be weak and I wasn’t, I shot him and I th-threw the gun away, Darcy, I threw it away, but they’re—he’s _dead_ , he’s dead, I don’t know what to do, he’s dead and he knew about me and B-Ben going to see Fisk’s mother, and what if he’s told Fisk, what if he’s told Fisk about Ben, he said he didn’t, but what if he _said_ something, what if—”

“I’m here. Okay? Just breathe. Just for a minute. Just breathe.”

“He thought he’d scare me.” She doesn’t seem to even know what she’s saying anymore. She’s babbling, like a lanced wound, all of the infection pouring over them both. “Wesley, he thought—he thought the gun would scare me, and I was so, so scared, Darcy, I thought I was going to die, but he died instead, I killed him, he thought I was weak and I wasn’t, I killed him, I killed him—”

Wesley. _I killed him_. Wesley, dead. It ripples through her in an earthquake, the shuddering knowledge of it. James Wesley is dead. The man who’d looked at her with bright, considering eyes, who’d threatened them all, who’d turned her over to Nobu and offered her a job and put a bandage on her hand and said _better to kill them both now before they fuck things up worse_ , that man is dead. _Fisk’s right hand man is gone because of Karen Fucking Page._ Her tether lines have been cut, and she’s drifting in a starless sea. Darcy closes her eyes. “Wesley’s dead.”

Karen nods. She’s hyperventilating, shaking, breathing too fast and too hard to stay standing. “I killed him,” she says again, and she buckles. Her knees hit the floor first. Darcy’s yanked down with her, bent awkwardly, her hair caught in one of Karen’s earrings. Karen doesn’t notice. “I—I murdered him. He was going to murder us all. I _killed_ him.”

 _And Fisk is going to come after you._ Their milk and honey queen, sweetness and fury in one, Fisk will hunt her like an animal, until she’s in pieces. Darcy crouches down, pressing her hand to Karen’s cheek, searching her eyes. Karen won’t meet her gaze. Instead, she bites her first knuckle and begins to rock, crying quietly. She can’t seem to stop. _What can I do_? What is she supposed to say? She wets her lips. “You killed him?”

“I shot him.” The words send a shiver up Karen’s spine. She grabs Darcy’s wrist, holds on. “I shot him. He left the gun in my reach and I shot him. Darcy, I _killed_ him. I—I took his life, I don’t—I’m not—”

She doesn’t know what to say, but her mouth moves anyway. “ _Good_ ,” Darcy snarls, and Karen freezes. “People try to kill you, you kill them back. You don’t just roll over. You don’t just let them hurt you. You killed him. _Good_.”

Karen hiccups. Her eyes narrow until they’re slits. “But—”

“He was a monster.” There’s something cold in her, icy and crusted over with hoarfrost. “He played Temple Run while Nobu put a knife through my hand.” _And then he bandaged it later_ , she thinks, and the whole of her insides turns over, because she doesn’t want to remember that. She wants to remember the way he’d looked at her, the way he’d said _good girl_ , like she was a dog that needed petting. The way the sniper sight had bobbed against the fabric of her shirt. “He tried to hurt you and you hurt him back. He tried to kill you, you killed him back. You’re alive, he’s not. _Good_.”

Karen turns absolutely still. Then, slowly, she raises her hands. She hooks her fingers through Darcy’s, holding on. She doesn’t touch Darcy’s broken hand. “I don’t want that kind of power,” she says. “I don’t—I don’t want to hurt people. I killed him. And it was so _easy_. That’s not what I _wanted_. I wanted—I wanted—”

“Justice.”

“The truth,” Karen corrects. “Out there, for everyone to see. I didn’t want them _dead_.”

“And then he tried to kill you.”

“And then he tried to kill me.”

The dark part of her is curled into a ball, legs twitching. It can’t see why Karen’s stuck on this, on this moment of death. But then she thinks of life, of choice, and she understands it. “Did you go in there aiming to kill him?”

She blinks. “N-No, but—”

“Did you plan it?”

“No, but—”

“Was he innocent?”

“No.” Her eyes are opening, wider and wider, like mirrors. “Darcy—”

“Did he try to hurt you?”

“He—he offered me a job.” _Like he did with me._ Wesley seems to have wanted a secretary rather desperately. “And—and then his phone rang, and I just—I grabbed the gun, and he was g-going to—he was going to kill all of you, he said, if I didn’t—because I didn’t do what he wanted, one by one, all of you, he was going to _hurt_ you, he was going to—”

“So you killed him,” Darcy says. “You didn’t kill him for you. You killed him for us. You killed him to protect us. You killed him for _us_ , Karen.”

Karen wavers. There’s hair sticking to her mouth. “But I—”

“You saved us.” She strokes her thumb over Karen’s cheek, smearing mascara and eye shadow. “You saved us, Karen. You killed him but you saved us.”

Karen closes her eyes and breathes. “But I killed him,” she says, and this is the sticking point. This is what Darcy can’t understand, and even with all the hate inside her, some part of her hopes that she’ll never understand it. She’s on one side of a crevasse, and Karen’s on the other, and that can’t be changed.

“Yeah.” She keeps her voice firm, and flat, and even. “You killed him. You carry that with you. You never forget it. But you did it for us. You did it to protect us. You’re not a monster. You did it to protect us, Karen. You’re not an animal.”

“I shouldn’t have told you.” Her face is screwing up again. “It’s—it’s staining, it’s _everywhere_ , I can’t get the feel of the gun off my hands, Darcy, I don’t—”

“Karen.” She kisses one cheek, and then the other. Her vivid red lipstick leaves prints behind. With the black streaks from Karen’s mascara, the marks look like twisted war paint. “Karen, listen to me. You did the right thing. You killed him, and that was wrong, but you’re not evil. You’re not stained. Do you hear me? You are _good_. You are a good person, and you are a strong person, and we’re going to get through this. Do you understand?”

“Don’t tell Foggy,” Karen says, and her voice is so utterly broken. “Don’t tell Foggy or Matt. Please, please don’t tell them. I don’t know—I can’t. They can’t know. Darcy, they _can’t_.”

Darcy closes her eyes. “Okay,” she says, because it’s the only thing she can say. “Okay. Not yet.”

“Not _ever_.”

 _Oh, god._ She’d promised she’d never lie to Foggy again. She’d _promised_. “Karen.”

“ _Please_ ,” Karen says, and her nails bite into Darcy’s elbows. “Darcy, _please_. You can’t tell them. You can’t, I don’t—I don’t want them to hate me, please, please don’t tell them, please, _please_ —”

“Okay.” The word rips pieces of her throat out with it. “Okay. I won’t tell them. I promise, Karen, okay? I won’t tell them. I won’t. Not unless—not unless you want me to.”

“Don’t tell me what?” says Foggy in the doorway, and Karen screams. She actually screams, scrambling to her feet and pressing a hand to her lips like she’s holding back bile. Foggy jumps so badly that he drops his coat, and stares at them both with eyes like plates. “Jesus. You look terrible. What happened?”

Karen shakes her head, wordless. For a second, Darcy thinks she’s going to dissolve into dust. Then she _bolts._ She doesn’t even grab her purse; she runs through the door and clatters down the stairs and is gone before Darcy can even pick herself up off the floor. When she tries to stand, she slips. She hears Foggy call Karen’s name, hears footsteps on the wood, but she’s done something to her wrist in the landing—the world blacks out for a minute or two, and there’s only pain, sick and nauseating, radiating up her arm like a cancer. When she can finally sit up without puking, Foggy’s crouched over her, petting at her hair and glancing at the door like he’s just seen a ghost.

“Shit,” says Darcy, and picks herself up off the floor. Foggy offers her a hand, and she yanks herself up. “ _Shit_. Foggy, where’d she go?”

“I don’t know, I made it down to the street and she was gone, I didn’t see her anywhere—what the fuck happened?”

“Karen’s having a bad night,” Darcy says. There are still tears damp on her cheeks. She might have thrown up in her mouth a little. “Foggy, I think I did something to my wrist.”

“Holy shit,” says Foggy. “Um—hospital?”

“No hospital.”

“ _Yes_ hospital, what if you broke it again?”

“I don’t think I did. I think it’s—I think it’s the stitches in my hand, I just jostled the break, I think. Look, the cast is fine.” And the cast is fine. It’s her fingers that look kind of iffy. And the bloody bandage over her palm. “Fuck a mother goose. What are you even doing here?”

“I forgot some papers—do you want me to call CC?”

“I don’t want to call her unless it’s an emergency.”

“If you’ve broken anything else, it’s an emergency.”

“No, it feels better.” And it is, slowly. The pain is fading back to something manageable. “Karen’s more important right now. Because we’re all—well, it seems like it’s kind of, um, been an intense night all around. _Shit_ , where’s my phone?”

She has the burner out of her purse and is halfway through dialing Karen’s number before she realizes that Karen’s phone will be in _her_ purse, which is currently tipped over and vomiting its contents onto the floor. Darcy kicks Karen’s desk, and growls. Foggy stares at the burner phone for a second or two. Then he blinks.

“Wait, _you’re_ Hottie McBurner Phone?”

“No, Hottie McBurner Phone is Claire. She’s in Albany. She was the one who I called to help fix Matt.” She dials Matt’s number instead, with shaking hands. “Shit. She can’t be alone right now. I don’t know what she’ll do. I don’t know—Jesus _shit_.”

“Uh.” Foggy looks like he’s just been kicked. “Sorry.”

“Not your fault,” says Darcy, though it _is_ kind of his fault, because he came in at the _worst possible time._ “Not really. Matt, hey.”

“I heard someone scream,” says Matt, utterly without preamble, and oh, god, even if he _was_ eavesdropping, she fucking loves him so much right now. “What happened?”

“Foggy scared Karen and she ran off, I don’t know where she went. Can you—”

“I’ll find her.” He hangs up without another word, and she relaxes, bit by bit, tension leaking out of her like a faucet. First Kate, then Matt, then Foggy, then Lynch and Tandy and Ty, and now this. She presses her phone to her lips to keep them from trembling, and closes her eyes. Foggy gives her a top to toe look—her hair tangled from being braided up under the wig for so long, her broken wrist pressed close into her stomach, the redness of her eyes—and then sighs.

“Guess you’re staying with me for the night. Lemme grab the papers I need and then we can go.”

Darcy’s not entirely sure about that, but she’s not stupid enough to not take the gesture for what it is. She nods once, grabs Karen’s purse, and lets him herd her out of the office.

Foggy’s apartment over the liquor store is too hot in summer and too cold in winter, the roof in the kitchen leaks, the stove barely works half the time, and she knows for a fact that there’s a rat living underneath the sink (Foggy’s named it Rattigan) but it doesn’t have an asshole billboard blaring light in through the living room window, which means it’s a step up from Matt’s. It also has a TV, and a bunch of posters she recognizes from Foggy’s side of Matt and Foggy’s dorm room in college, not to mention a trio of bookshelves stuffed full with books of all shapes and sizes. They enter in silence, Darcy because she doesn’t have anything left to say, Foggy because he’s thinking too hard, and she touches each of the locks he chains, just to reassure herself that they’re there. Foggy lets her do it, watching her with creased eyebrows. “You okay?”

“Yeah, um.” She swallows. “Ask me that tomorrow.”

 _I killed him._ Karen. Killing people. Wesley dead. Karen with the gun in her hands. _Oh my god._ She rests the back of her hand against her lips, and swallows. _Okay, Lewis. Breathe._ Wesley is dead. There’s something wrong with her, because she’s more worried about Karen and Karen’s guilt and Karen’s terror than sick over the fact that someone is _actually dead._ Someone she knows—someone she’d met, really, she can’t say she _knew_ the guy, though she thinks exchanging death threats might make him important somehow, and oh, god, James Wesley is dead. She thinks of Blake, and then turns to Foggy. “Um. Can I—I need to shower.”

Foggy dumps his shit onto the beat-up couch (“perfectly broken in, Lewis”) and nods. “Yeah. Sure. Clean clothes are in the laundry basket.”

The bathroom is clean, and there are plastic bags for her arms under the sink. Foggy’s always been obsessive about keeping his bathrooms clean, whether it was wiping down the counters in the dorm bathrooms back at Columbia or making sure his anti-condensation mirror is absolutely fucking spotless. She feels like she ought to be leaving behind marks wherever she touches. Darcy washes her face once, and then again, and winds her hair back into a high ponytail. What’s left of her make-up is smeared and her eyes are rimmed with crimson. She wipes her face off on a washcloth, rinses the thing out, and pulls off the turtleneck, pressing the cool cloth to the back of her neck. _Karen._ She wraps her fingers tight around the rim of the sink, and takes a breath. _Don’t break down now, dammit. You’ve handled worse._

Has she, though? She wets the cloth down again, and presses it to her eyes. Then she strips, methodically, and steps into the shower. The water’s shockingly cold, and she lets it stay that way for a minute or two, until her hands are shaking. Matt, slamming a pipe down on the thug’s back, breaking bone. Blood under her fingernails. Foggy, looking at her like she’s wrecked him, like his world has just been ripped out from under his feet. Claire, bruised, hurting, smiling. Kate, crumpled, her pain so thick and heavy that it had been like a child caught between them. Jen, crying with her cheek pressed to Darcy’s. _Don’t lie to me again._ Elena, with her bandages and her pride and her smile. _If you need me, you know where I am._ And Karen, a purple necklace around her throat, her hands shaking and her nails broken and her mouth open, screaming, screaming. She covers her mouth with one hand, and her back hits the wall. Darcy sinks down to the floor, and hides her face in her knees, breathing hard. The water stings her skin.

 _I am haunted by humans,_ Zusak had said. She’s never not going to see them in her mind’s eye, those looks, those nightmares. _It’s not the dead that follow us. It’s the living, and their pain._

By the time she manages to reemerge from the bathroom, Foggy’s turned on the TV, and there are fresh take-out cartons on the counter. The laugh track on the _How I Met Your Mother_ rerun is making her twitch. “You ordered food,” she says, blankly, and he looks up from his box of chow mein.

“Yeah, well. Food fixes everything.” He sticks his chopsticks into the noodles. “How did your, um, meeting with Lynch and Jenson go?”

She blinks, and wonders if this is how Matt feels when she asks him about devil work. “You’re asking me how my interrogation of a pair of rapists went.”

“I figure if this, uh, this vigilante thing is going to become a regular dealio, I should at least know enough about it to ask you questions. Be a good neighbor. Cringe at the right bruises. Besides, whatever you and Karen were talking about, it’s clearly not something you can, you know. Tell me about. Maybe ever. So.”

In spite of everything, her mouth quirks. Her chin trembles a little bit, but that’s a secret between her and the books. “Christ, Foggy. You’re like…the best person. I swear to god.”

“I will gladly take all forms of worship you deem necessary, oh pilgrim. Food?”

“Uh.” Her stomach growls. “Yeah. Food is good.”

He gives her fucking nirvana in a bowl (AKA the knockoff Chinese food from the place down the street, but they make it so well that nobody cares how actually inauthentic it is) and then drops down next to her on the couch. Darcy sticks her toes into the blanket he has draped over the pillows, and wonders if he’s been falling asleep to the TV again. He does that more often than he admits. “So,” he says again. “Yeah. Lynch?”

“I killed him in an alleyway, danced on his corpse, and howled at the moon.”

He nearly slops his chow mein down his shirt. “ _Darcy_.”

“You’re too fucking easy, Nelson, I swear.” She blows on a steaming onion. “I scared him a little, like I said I would, but that’s it. I don’t know if you want to know the details.” She debates for a moment. “I used the name you gave me.”

Foggy blinks. He blinks again. “I gave you a name?”

“You called me Lilith, remember? First thing that popped into my head. It kind of—fits, in a weird way.” _The queen of monsters._ She doesn’t say it. “It feels—it felt like the right name to use.”

“Oh.” He steals a bit of chicken out of her bowl, even though his own food is _perfectly fine_ , and swallows before he says, “I don’t know if I’m really pleased or frightened out of my skull that that makes me an accomplice to physical and verbal assault, but, y’know. Cool. Can I have an onion?”

She puts her foot on his shoulder, and shoves him away. “You have your own food. Get back to it.”

Her burner phone buzzes, but when she checks the screen, it’s only Claire. _All okay?_ She has to swallow again ( _you’ve cried enough, now get back up and keep walking_ ) before putting her food aside.

“Matt?” Foggy says. Darcy rolls her eyes.

“He might be a superhero or whatever now, but I’m pretty sure he refuses to text just on principle. Also there’s the thing about, y’know, him not really being able to tell if he makes a typo.” _As okay as it can be when things are going to shit. Thanks for CC, again. She helped a lot. How’s Albany?_ “No, it’s Claire.”

“Hottie McBurner Phone.”

“Hottie McBurner Phone,” Darcy repeats, and takes another bite of General Tso’s. Now that she’s eating, she’s realizing just how hungry she’s actually been, all day, really, ever since she’d decided she was going to hit Daily Daze. “God, this is a terrible fucking night.”

“Lynch and Jenson were that bad, then?”

“No, I don’t think so. Just—just a lot of stuff.”

Foggy stirs his chopsticks through his chow mein for a minute, the way he traced his finger through the sugar at Josie’s. He’s showered since then, she thinks. He doesn’t smell so much like alcohol. _Shitty,_ says Claire. _I didn’t think I’d miss the sirens, but I do. It’s too quiet up here._ Then Foggy turns just slightly into her, and coughs. “Uh. Do you want to talk about it?”

“Honestly, I really just—I want to sleep.” Preferably without nightmares, but there’s no guarantee at this point. “It’s—the past few days have been really terrible, and tonight was kind of the crowning jewel of that.” She eyes him. “You’re not—you’re not mad at me for not telling you what Karen told me?”

“She seemed pretty panicked, so no, I’m not mad at you. I’m sad that she doesn’t think she can trust me, but—but I’m not mad at you. Like I said before, you keeping secrets for friends, that doesn’t bother me. And at least you’re being open about it this time.” He glowers at her. “Eat your damn chicken.”

“You keep your stupid mitts away from it and I might get the chance,” she says, but she eats her damn chicken. Foggy leans back into the sofa cushions, resting the take-out box on his lap. Then he turns again, rolling his head towards her the same way he’s always done, as if he’s never forgotten where she is, as if he expects to find her there.

“Hey,” he says. “Will you tell me about Eli?”

The food turns to ash on her tongue. Darcy swallows, and clenches her hand tight around her chopsticks. Foggy doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t try to justify or explain himself. He just watches her, and she knows that if she tells him no, he won’t push again. Darcy can’t meet his gaze for very long. She looks down at her food again, ignoring the way her hands quake. “What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you remember about him.” Foggy curves towards her, propping his chin in one hand. “What was his favorite food?”

She can’t remember _anything_ , for a second, and it opens up a chasm inside her. “I think—he loved apples. His dad always brought them home when he had a double-shift. Eli would always bring me one or two, make me beg for them, because Mom never—she never remembered to get shit like that. I think he would have lived off of apples if he’d been able to manage it.”

Foggy nods.

“He—I remember he liked Joan Jett,” she says. “My mom had a bunch of old CDs in the living room, only organized place in there, y’know. And—and when he was over, we’d pick one of her CDs, the Blackhearts or the Runaways or—or anything, really, and listen to it. If my mom was asleep we’d grab the stereo and take it out into the alley behind the house and blast it, shout along with things like _Cherry Bomb_ and _I Love Rock And Roll_ and all the rest of it.”

She’s not sure how long she talks. She just keeps going. These are things she’s never let herself think about, in the years since Eli died. She’s never really even considered them. They’re woven into the fabric of her mind, less knowledge than truth, and she doesn’t have to think about them to know they’re a part of her. Still, the more she talks, the more she remembers, until she’s living in damp muggy afternoons in the Atlanta projects, throwing rocks through store front windows and shoplifting candy bars because they’ll never get them any other way, bitching about pre-algebra and that one history teacher that creeps them out because he always stands too close to kids, a praying mantis ready to feast. She talks and talks and talks, and Foggy—Foggy listens.

Foggy listens.

.

.

.

She swims back into the world like an eel, flinching away from the light. Vanessa opens her eyes slowly, struggling to understand. There’s something in her nose, she thinks. There’s a prick of pain in her arm, and an odd, faded agony all through her. It feels as though her veins have been peeled out of her body and replaced with cotton wool. The world’s fuzzy around the edges, like an old photograph. She coughs, and blinks again, trying to clear her sight. She hears someone’s breathing catch (and it’s so odd, hearing it through whatever’s in her ears, buzzing, staticky) and then a face swims over hers. She tries to lift a hand, but her muscles won’t work. “Wilson.”

“No.” The voice is clipped, accented. “I work with Wilson. Do not exert yourself. You are still very weak.”

Poison. Benefit. She closes her eyes and sinks into the pillows for a moment or two, steadying herself. She must have fallen asleep, after speaking with Wilson. Who knows how long ago that was? An hour, a day. Vanessa wets her lips. “I have to apologize. I’m not exactly equipped for entertainment.”

“And I do not ask for it.” This time, when Vanessa turns her head and opens her eyes, she can keep them open for more than a moment. The woman is small, the sort that comes with age rather than genetics, shoulders, waist, and hips meeting and matching underneath her bulky clothes. She’s perched on the edge of her chair like a bird, watching Vanessa with an expression that’s almost fond. “You must rest, if you are to heal. The poison was a nasty thing.”

Vanessa blinks, slowly. “I’m sorry. I don’t know your name.”

She may have fallen asleep again, if only for a few moments. All she can remember is blackness. Then the woman clears her throat. “You may call me Iris, if you like. It is not my name, but I think that will serve for now.”

She can’t get her brain to work right. It’s too sluggish. She’s used to it being faster, sharper. She swallows, and wishes she had water. Or wine. “Did Wilson leave you to watch me?”

“No.” Iris leans back in her chair, her hands folded neatly over the head of her cane. “He has many men for that. No, I came to speak with you. I felt it was time that we talk, you and I, face to face. And I think that Wilson would be—very unhappy if he learned of it.”

Vanessa squeezes her eyes shut, trying to clear them. The pain meds, the antibiotics or antitoxin or whatever it is they’re pumping into her blood, it’s making her woozy. She wants it out of her. “I don’t understand. What could we have to talk about?”

“I told Wilson, when he first began to see you—” and that’s such a way to put it, _seeing_ her, like he hasn’t seen right through her since the beginning. Like she hasn’t seen through him from the start. “—that he would have to choose. That fate would make him do so. To pick between you and this cause he has chosen, to be the warrior he thinks his city needs, or to be with you. I thought, at the benefit, that fate—” she says it oddly, as if it’s something she has some sort of power over “—had made the choice for him. But it seems it has not.” She considers Vanessa for a long moment. “You are much stronger than any of us had given you credit for. I do not like it when I must reevaluate my impression of someone, Miss Marianna.”

“My apologies,” says Vanessa, and wonders if she ought to be hitting the button for the nurse. “I didn’t mean to put you out of your way.”

To her surprise, Iris snorts. “Do not apologize. It has not turned out poorly. For better or for worse, it seems that you are here to stay.” She shuffles her hands on her cane. “Which is why I have come to make you an offer.”

Vanessa looks up towards the ceiling. God, she just needs sleep. There’s too much noise in this room, too much babble. It was easier with Wilson. Now she feels like shattered crystal, bloody to the touch. “Oh? And what offer would that be?”

“You cannot remain as you are, if you are to stay in this nest you’ve built.” Iris shifts in her chair. “Remaining with Wilson Fisk is a danger in and of itself. You cannot continue on merely as the beauty who tames the savage beast. There will always be those who wish to harm him, and to reach him, they will harm you. It is clear that neither you nor Wilson will take the safer path, the wiser one, and so you must be prepared for the danger.”

She doesn’t say anything. She just turns to look at Iris again, forcing her eyebrows up. It hurts, but she does it, and Vanessa thinks she’s made Iris smile because of it.

“I will train you,” says Iris. “I will not remain in this country any longer than I must, and I feel that that time will soon be coming to an end. But for as long as I am here, I will ensure that you have the tools you need to survive.”

“How magnanimous of you.” She swallows. “And what am I supposed to do for you in return? Not tell Wilson that you were the one who tried to have me killed?”

It’s a shot in the dark, but Iris doesn’t blink. She tips her head back and laughs. “I knew you were smarter than you appeared,” she says, and Vanessa feels, oddly, as if she’s passed some sort of grand test. _This woman tried to kill me_ , she thinks, but the thought doesn’t terrify her the way it would have when she was just Vanessa Marianna, gallery owner. It only makes her think. “It does not matter if you tell him. He cannot harm me. He thinks he can, but he cannot, and if he attempts it he’ll learn that, to his injury. No, I think you’ll keep that part a secret, if only to try and keep him safe.”

She hates that she’s so obvious. “Then what would you have me do? I’m afraid I’m not quite up to doing nasty favors at the moment.”

“And even if you were up to it, I would not ask that of you. For now, our association will remain untainted with the realities of Wilson Fisk’s day-to-day violence.” Iris stands, and brushes some of Vanessa’s hair back out of her face. Her hand is cool and dry, and in spite of herself, Vanessa feels sleepy. “That we will discuss at another time, Miss Marianna. For now, you must rest, and recover. Wilson will need you in the days to come, and besides: you can be of no use to anyone trapped in a hospital bed like this.”

“And who am I to be of use for?” Her words are slurring. “You? Or Wilson?”

“No, not to Wilson Fisk,” says Iris, and pats her cheek. “To yourself.”

It shouldn’t be reassuring, but it is. It’s just reassuring enough that Vanessa fades back into sleep. And this time, when she sleeps, she dreams.

.

.

.

 _Eli turns to Matt turns to Karen turns to Wesley, and there’s blood blossoming on his cheeks as the bullet strikes home. Karen screams, and the gun falls into darkness, and she’s running and there’s nowhere to go_ , _and Fisk is there, always, dark-eyed and looming like a living curse_ —

There’s a crick in her arm and her jaw is out of whack when Darcy finally heaves herself back to consciousness. It takes a minute for her to recognize where she is. The couch smells like Cheetos and old pizza, the TV is on (turned to a rerun of _Criminal Minds_ , which is so not what will help her right now) and there’s a blanket draped over her, the black and yellow one that she’s always called the Hufflepuff blanket because it’s totally Foggy’s House colors. When she checks her watch, it tells her politely that it’s one in the afternoon, Claire’s most recent text is _yo, you dead? Because I don’t want to be cleaning blood out of my carpet again,_ and by the way, she has three missed calls from Mike. She groans. “ _Fuck_.”

“Good morning, sleeping beauty,” says Foggy, sounding like he’s just _so pleased_ that she’s crashed on his couch for the first time in forever. She wonders how many pictures he took of her drooling into the pillows. Or whether or not she started swearing in her sleep. “Actually, I should be saying afternoon, you lazy minx. Your phone has been making angry noises for hours. Feed it before I kill it.”

“You’re an asshole,” she says, and crams the cushion over her face.

“Who’s Mike, anyway? Are you cheating on the trio?” He pauses. “Well, technically a quartet, now, isn’t it? With Karen.”

Her stomach jumps and falls at once. _Karen._ Fisk’s shadow is following them. Is this what the dinosaurs felt like, watching the meteor fall? “Mike is the name he used to pretend he wasn’t Matt,” she says into the pillow, but it’s all just a jumble of consonants that even she can’t make sense of. Foggy ignores it.

“Whatever, just don’t cheat on us, you traitor. Your other phone went off, too, the one that looks like it went through a microwave. What did you do, take a sledgehammer to it?”

Close enough. She tugs the banana phone closer to her. It’s Ben Urich, of all people. Six missed calls, and one text. _When you see this, call me._ She flicks through her phone screens, entering the number into the burner. At this point, she doesn’t care who has the burner number. She’s pretty sure that Ben Urich isn’t going to be the one to turn it over to the police. “I had a temper tantrum.”

“Hell of a temper tantrum.”

“Wasn’t as bad as it could have been,” she says. Lynch’s phone is still turned off (she knows about GPS and Find My Phone apps and shit, she doesn’t want to fuck with that) so she leaves it alone. Instead, Darcy hits the redial button on the burner. There are a handful of texts from Claire, too, because apparently she’s just _so_ popular this morning, but for now, Matt—and quite probably Karen—come first. “I could have stepped on it with my killer sex-boots.”

“I will admit that would probably have been worse.” She’s pretty sure he hasn’t slept, or if he has, it wasn’t enough to matter. “Nothing from Karen?”

“I’m checking now.”

Foggy’s mouth goes all weird and tight, but he shrugs and turns back to his kitchen project. She can smell ketchup, which means he’s probably microwave-ovening some kind of fried potato substance. (Foggy eats like a Midwestern farmer. It’s kind of hilarious.) _So, the Matt/Foggy front is still devastating and terrible._ She hadn’t expected that to really change, even after both of her talks with Foggy last night, but…well, a girl can dream.

The phone rings for so long that she thinks he won’t pick up. Then there’s a crashing noise, and a muttered curse. Her heart stops. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Matt’s voice comes from faraway for a moment. Then there’s a scrape, and it’s normal again. He sounds very tired. “I knocked the phone off the crate and it went under the couch.”

“You klutz.”

He grunts. “Nearly woke Karen. Gimme a minute, I’ll just—yeah.”

The knots in her muscles slowly start to unwind. “She’s with you, then.”

“After half an hour of running around Hell’s Kitchen and making me climb a chain link fence? Yeah, she’s with me.” He sounds grumpy about it, too. “She can run damn fast when she wants to.”

“Especially if someone’s _chasing her_ , Matt, Jesus.”

“She wouldn’t stop. I didn’t want her to get hurt.”

“Let’s just say that both you and Foggy are creepy and have a tendency to follow frightened blondes, and then move on.” In the kitchen, Foggy makes a noise like a duck being squashed. She ignores it. “How is she?”

“Tired.” He stops, and then starts again. “Not good.”

Darcy bites her lip. “Did she—did she tell you what happened?”

Matt’s quiet for a long time. “No. Did she tell you?”

She closes her eyes. “Yeah. She, uh. It’s not good.” _I killed him._ And Darcy can still taste it in her mouth, the _pride._ Karen had killed him. And all she’d had to say was _good._ “Wait, shit, you didn’t go after her as the mask, did you?”

“And how else was I supposed to chase her?” says Matt, peevishly.

And now Karen’s in his apartment. “You told her?”

A sigh is her only answer. She hears the fridge door open, and then shut again.  

“You told her,” she says again, and Foggy pokes his head out of the kitchen to stare at the phone like it’s an alien being. “You actually told her.”

“As I recall, you were all for this idea.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t—I don’t know.”

His laugh, when it comes, is husky and bitter. “I don’t either. I think it was the only thing that made her stop running. I’m still not sure if she was even actually thinking about it, or if she just needed to move. Get the panic out. She, uh. She punched me in the face.”

“She _what_.” Darcy nearly chokes on her tongue. “Wait, she actually managed to—”

“Shut up, Darcy.”

“Politely refraining from all mentions of your super-senses and moving on. Do you—uh. Do you need me to come over?”

“You still at Foggy’s?”

“I’m not going to ask how you know that.” She squashes the blanket between her knees. “Yeah, I’m still at Foggy’s. Ben’s been calling me nonstop, though. I think something’s happened.”

“She’s gonna sleep for a while.” He sighs again. “Shit. I need to go and talk to Ben. I was thinking last night about everything we know about Fisk, the Russians, the Triad—”

“Matt.” She glances over at Foggy (he’s retreated back into the kitchen) and then lowers her voice. “Matt, you were awake for all of last night and half of the night before. You need to sleep at some point before you pass out.”

Matt makes a noise deep in the back of his throat. For some reason it reminds her of a bear. “I’m fine. Someone needs to watch Karen.”

“You’re fine. That’s why you knocked the cell phone off the carton.” He doesn’t respond. “Please just sleep. For two hours, maybe. One of us can watch Karen. We’ll take turns.”

Foggy sticks his head out of the kitchen. “You’re signing me up for what, now?”

“Watching Karen,” she snaps at him. “Not Matt. _Karen._ Jesus, you guys.” She presses the phone close to her cheek. “We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Don’t make him come over here if he doesn’t want to.”

“Oh my god, will both of you just—I know you guys are fighting right now but this is _Karen._ Don’t you dare make this more difficult than it has to be.” She glares at Foggy. “ _Karen,_ Fog. Jesus, just—you can ignore each other as much as you want, we just need to make sure that Karen’s okay, and not alone, and—and safe. For Christ’s sake.”

Foggy, at least, has the grace to look ashamed. She’s not sure what Matt’s doing, but his silence carries volumes. She pinches the bridge of her nose ( _don’t cry, Lewis_ ) and heaves a sigh. “Twenty minutes.”

“Yeah,” Matt says, hoarse. “Twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes,” Foggy repeats, and disappears back into the kitchen, muttering under his breath. 

They’re there in fifteen, because Darcy has always marched places instead of walking, and even with Foggy dragging his feet he’s worried about Karen, too. Matt opens the door like it’s a bomb waiting to go off. He’s wearing his glasses, and the bruises on his cheek from whatever fight he had with the armor-man last night have swollen right up. There’s also a split in his lip that wasn’t there before. _Karen._ Darcy steps aside, and waits for Foggy to pass before slipping in herself. She’s pretty sure that if she doesn’t, Foggy will just bolt, and they’ll be right back to square one again. (She rests her hand against Matt’s shoulder blade as she steps past him, heading into the kitchen. She can’t help it.) She can see Karen through the open door frame, asleep in Matt’s bed, her hair tangled over her face. Foggy gives the debris and the couch the same look as he would a dead animal on the sidewalk, and perches on the edge of the armchair instead. Neither Foggy nor Matt say anything.

Minutes pass.

“Well,” says Darcy. “This isn’t awkward _at all_.”

“I’m here for Karen,” says Foggy shortly, and sticks his earbuds in, turning his music up loud enough that she can hear it. Darcy sighs through her nose, and touches her fingertips to the back of Matt’s wrist to tug him along after her. She _knows_ , logically, that if she just jerks her head at him he’ll know, and he’ll follow, but years of ingrained habit are sticking in her throat.

“Help me make coffee. And then you sleep. Okay?”

“I’m fine,” he says, but he’s moving himself around his wound, rather than with it, so she knows for a fact that he’s lying. “I don’t need sleep.”

“Everyone needs sleep.” She pulls the bag of pre-ground coffee from the fridge, because she’s not about to puree beans and wake Karen. “How long has she been out?”

“Maybe two hours.” Matt rubs the bridge of his nose, and hits the lever on the electric kettle. “She started to dream about ten minutes ago. I don’t know if it’ll wake her up or not.”

“What about you, did you get any rest at all?”

He shakes his head once, and boosts himself up onto the counter, his back to Foggy. She can see Foggy watching him when he thinks Darcy and Matt won’t notice, but she doesn’t mention it. “I was thinking. When I was—after I found Karen last night, I realized that the Russians would have left a hole in the heroin trade, the one Fisk’s running. They were his distributors in the city. Without them, someone would have had to pick up the slack.”

Darcy gives him a sidelong look. Matt doesn’t seem to notice. She wonders exactly how much he can perceive with his echolocation, how much he can hear and guess about. “You’re making the hunch face again. Quit it with the hunch face.”

His lips twitch, ever so slightly. “I have good hunches.”

“You usually have excellent hunches, but anyone who hasn’t slept in thirty-six hours can’t be trusted to have excellent anything.” She spoons coffee grounds into the press. “Matt, seriously. Just sleep. Just for a bit. Okay?”

His eyes crinkle behind his glasses. “I told you I’m an insomniac.”

“No, you just lead a double life. Go to sleep.”

He sighs, and she knows she’s won. Matt slips off the counter again, shoving his hands into his sweatpants pockets. “Let me know how it goes with Ben. I don’t know what he has to talk to you about, but if he’s calling you that many times in a row, it can’t be good.”

“Yeah, okay.” There are words pressing against the roof of her mouth that she can’t say. She glances once at Foggy (he’s playing Candy Crush, judging by the way his fingers are moving; never a good sign) and touches his wrist again, out of sight behind the counter. “When you wake up.”

“Yeah.” There’s a pause, like he wants to say something else. Matt laughs a little under his breath, and tips his head towards hers. “It’s easier to sleep when you’re here.”

She blushes. She actually fucking _blushes_ , which is so weird she can’t even comment on it. “Shut your face. Go to sleep, you weirdo. Foggy won’t bite, I promise.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying about me but no, Dread Pirate Roberts, I will not have a duel of wits with you.” Foggy scowls at his screen. “Fuck these candy shits.”

Neither of them really have anything to say to that. Matt tugs on her pinky, and then returns to the couch. Foggy turns his face away as he does it, peering at Matt through the curtain of his hair. Matt settles on his side, but when she comes around to pass off Foggy’s cup of coffee she can tell that he’s not about to sleep until the awkward silence breaks. Foggy can tell, too, she sees it, and after about twenty minutes of insanity he mutters something about needing fresh air and heads out the roof access door. Matt’s out about ten minutes after that, breathing quietly, and so Darcy sits between two sleepers, staring out the window with her knees drawn up to her chest and her toes hidden under a blanket.

It’s about three o’clock when Foggy finally tiptoes his way back into the apartment, pushing the door shut so quietly that it nearly makes her cringe. Darcy trades chairs with him (Foggy settles himself so he can see Karen more easily than he can see Matt, but he still gives Matt a conflicted sort of worried look that makes her heart lift, just a little) and then heads up to the roof to finally get some shit done. She calls Kate twice (straight to voice mail, but considering the sort of day they’d all had yesterday, it doesn’t surprise her) and then steels herself, and dials Ben at the _Bulletin_.

When Ben answers the phone, it’s with the sort of cautious “hello?” that she would never have expected from a journalist of Ben Urich’s caliber. She clears her throat.

“Hey. It’s Darcy Lewis? My old phone had an accident. I saw you were trying to get in touch with me?”

“Oh.” _There’s_ Ben Urich. Snappy and direct. “Goddammit, woman, I’ve been trying to get into contact with you for hours. Do you know where Kate is?”

“Kate?” Her heart turns to stone. “No, I don’t—I saw her yesterday afternoon, she was translating something for me, but not—not since then. Why?”

Ben hisses through his teeth. “Have you seen the news yet today?”

“No.” She can bully her banana phone into the internet, though. She sets the burner on speaker and typing the URL for the _Bulletin_ as best she can with one hand and a shattered screen. “Shit. Did something happen to her? What do you mean?”

“Better if you see,” says Ben, and she hits enter.

 _HAWKEYE GONE ROGUE?_ The headline screams, and her heart stops. Darcy scrolls through the front-page article, little phrases leaping out at her like bloodstains. _Assassination attempt on Robert and Richard Goodman results in car accident. Arrows found at scene. Richard Goodman in hospital. Avengers currently unavailable for comment._ Her hands are shaking. “Oh my fucking god,” she says, and on the other end of the line, Ben sighs.

“Yeah,” he says. “Oh my fucking god.”

She’s going to throw up. She’s not sure what else to do. _Head between your knees,_ says a voice that sounds very like Claire. Darcy drops down onto an air conditioning unit, puts her head between her knees, and breathes. _Panic attacks, bad. Breathe._ Kate tried to kill Robbie and Rich Goodman. _Oh my god._ Arrows. A car accident. Rich in the hospital. _Oh. My. Fucking. God._

 “Kate.” It’s the only thing she can say. “Oh my god. _Kate._ ”

“I have my people keeping an eye out for her,” says Ben, tinny through the phone. “We’ll track her down. I’ll call you when I have something, Lewis.”

 _Wesley knew about Karen and Ben,_ she thinks. _Wesley could have told Fisk._ “N-No.” She swallows hard. “No. I’ll—I want to help. I’ll be at the _Bulletin_ in forty minutes.”

“Forty minutes,” Ben says, and hangs up. 

Darcy sets her phone in her lap, and stares up at the cloudy sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Interrupting Foggy says hi.
> 
> Yes, before any of you ask, the scene with Karen punching Matt in the face WILL be posted at some point. I have it half done already. Also, I think the first part of the chapter with Karen and Ajeet is one of the best pieces of writing I've done for this entire fic. "Corrugated cardboard veins" is my favorite. 
> 
> sarcastissa drew another beautiful kitty!Matt thing and it's absolutely amazing and there will eventually be a crackfic where Matt gets turned into a cat and Darcy's just like "what the fuck do I do with my boyfriend now" and it will be awesome. 
> 
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz73qrQ2L-PgR1FrMF9WWnJBdzg/view?usp=sharing
> 
> Results of the naming competition! Lilith, by a landslide majority. All the other suggestions will receive an honorable mention in-story. (All hail Twitter hashtags.)


	18. Escape from Purgatory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realized as I was reading through what I have posted that I have been focusing a lot on kitty-cat!Matt and not as much on the devil. Which, clearly, is a terrible, terrible crime. Because _devil!Matt._
> 
> Ergo, as devil!Matt makes an appearance, I must give you triggers for violence, blood, attempted murder, general grumpy angst, intimidation, and growling. But the growling is hot, so I don't know if that's really a trigger.
> 
> All Japanese mistakes are mine.
> 
> Two Marvel-616 mentions in this one! See if you can spot them.

They’ve gone everywhere they can think of, and they still can’t find Kate.

Yoko doesn’t know anything, or if she does there’s no way for Darcy to be able to tell. An examination of Kate’s archery range shows that a full quiver of arrows and one of her recurve bows are both gone. So are the leggings, the purple-and-black ones that had been dangling over the bench the last time Darcy was down here. She’s taken her cell phone and a heavy coat with her, too. O’Reilly snaps and snarls when Darcy calls her, but says that she hasn’t seen or heard from Kate since yesterday either, so _stop fucking asking_. Ben’s people haven’t seen much of anything; no one at any of the precincts has heard a word about a teenage girl with purple streaks in her hair and a bow-and-arrow combo showing up anywhere in the city, and Rich Goodman’s hospital bed has been left unmolested. She even asks Brett, but there’s nothing he can tell her. “There’s no evidence that she’s the one who tried to kill the Goodmans, Lewis,” Brett says, with a very sharp look. “There’s nothing we can legally do until she’s been missing for forty-eight hours, anyway. Besides, not my precinct, not my problem. Unless you _make_ it my problem.”

She slinks out of the precinct with her tail between her legs. _Message received._ If they’re not after Kate yet, then they might not go after her at all.

The only good thing that seems to have come out of last night is that Mathias Lynch is currently in custody, and is being interrogated as an accomplice to the rape and assault of Kate Bishop. There are three cops on Rich Goodman’s hospital room right now, ostensibly to protect him from the Mysterious Assassin, but also (according to Brett) to arrest him as soon as he wakes up. That’s something, at least.

For the most part, Ben drives in silence. Sometimes his phone rings, and he spends two minutes or five or ten haranguing whoever’s on the other end of the line. Usually it’s about his other projects—“for god’s sakes, get your shit together, goddammit, I can’t believe I’m even writing about this Hell’s Kitchen subway station crap” or “Betty, go back to the beginning and start it over again, I know for a fact you’re skimping on sources and while you may have managed to get away with that at the _Bugle_ you’re not earning yourself any points here”—but sometimes he just sits and makes encouraging noises before cursing under his breath and hanging up again.

“One of my bookies in Times Square thinks might have seen her,” he says. Or: “Cop in Central Park reported a teenage girl with a big bag. Might be something.” Or: “Come on, Lewis, work with me here.”

Darcy jumps whenever he says that, and tries to drag her brain back out of panic. She keeps calling Kate, but it goes straight to voicemail each time.

They finally come to a stop outside the Barnes and Noble on 5th Ave (by some miracle finding a parking place, which is terrifying in and of itself) at about nine, because if they’re going to stop anywhere, it better be a bookstore. Ben pulls his keys out of the ignition, and pinches the bridge of his nose, pushing his glasses up into his forehead. “Christ,” he says, and um, yeah. That’s pretty much the only way to describe her current mood. “I’m gonna kill that kid.”

“Right behind you,” says Darcy, and unbuckles her seatbelt, pulling her knees up against her chest to hide her face in them. It’s childish, but she doesn’t particularly care right now. Twenty-five isn’t _that_ old, right? Besides, she’s pretty sure that being an adult is just being smart enough to know how thoroughly fucked you are by the world. It’d make anyone want to curl into a ball and cry. “Jesus Christ, Kate, what the hell are you thinking?”

“I don’t know that she’s thinking at all, to be honest.”

“But we’re so _close._ Lynch is in custody, he turned on the Goodmans—Ben, the DA is going to file criminal charges! And the civil suit is going to happen, we have—we have a preliminary meeting with the judge in a couple of days, god, why? _Why_ would she—”

But she knows why, doesn’t she? She’s always known why.

 _Put an arrow in Rich Goodman’s fucking eye socket._  

Ben drums his fingers against the wheel. “I don’t know. Which is unsettling in and of itself. What happened to your arm?”

She blinks, and looks at her arm for a moment. Then she looks at Ben. “Kate didn’t tell you?”

“I might have known that kid since she was twelve, but she doesn’t tell me a damn thing.” Ben frowns. “Tried my best with her, especially when her grandmother made things difficult. Sometimes she’d show up at the _Bulletin_ , nose around. My boss was thrilled about it, thought he’d get a Bishop as an intern eventually. Hadn’t heard from her in three years before she called me about maybe doing an interview.” He turns to Darcy. “She didn’t mention any of that to you?”

“No,” says Darcy, who is wondering whether or not Kate’s really told her anything about herself at all. “I mean, I knew her grandmother was an asshole and her dad did that thing about her name and stuff, but—not really any of that.”

Ben’s eyes narrow. “I know the grandmother was a problem, treated her like shit. Easy enough to see, even in the interviews. Whatever her dad did, that’s out of my territory.” Meaning _don’t say a word about it to me._ Darcy can pick up a cue, same as anybody. “Doesn’t talk about herself, much. Can’t blame her for wanting to put an arrow in Rich Goodman. I couldn’t promise not to kill the son of a bitch if I was alone in a room with him, either.”

Darcy grunts, and closes her eyes. “If it was her.”

“Lewis. Come on. An arrow through the hood of the car, and another through the windshield? One of my sources in the crime scene unit that attended said that judging from the angle it would have come from the top of a twenty-story building a block away. Clint Barton’s been out of the country since May. Only person I can think of that could make that shot? Kate Bishop.” She’s also been missing for hours, and though there could be a lot of explanations for that, there’s only one that makes all the facts line up. “I know how good her aim is. If she’d wanted him dead, he’d be dead by now. No, more likely it’s a warning, but to who, I have no idea.”

A warning. To Robbie Goodman? To Fisk? To the city? Nothing about that smells right. Darcy tries Kate’s cell phone again. It rings out. _We’re sorry, the mailbox belonging to the person you are trying to reach is full. Please hang up, and call again later._ There’s no answer to any of her texts, either. “You’re sure she could have made the shot?” she says, something cold and thin pressing against her throat. It feels like a knife. “If it was from that far away?”

“When she was thirteen I saw her put an arrow through a key ring at a hundred-and-fifty yards. She was shortlisted for the Olympic archery team before her father caught wind of it and banned her from auditioning. If someone told me she’d pulled a Mr. Miyagi and hit a fly in the eyeball at half a mile off, I’d believe them, and that’s me saying that. So yeah. I’m sure she could have made the shot, and I’m sure she chose not to. Which is why I’m not as worried as I could be.”

He means it to be reassuring, she’s certain. It doesn’t keep her from blasting way past panic into full-on, palms-sweating, pants-wetting terror. _Katherine Elinor Bishop, you’d better not be doing what I think you’re doing. Whoever you’re going after, you don’t do it alone. Vigilantism 101. Always have backup._

“Frankly,” Ben continues, as Darcy adds more and more exclamation points onto the end of her most recent text ( _I SWEAR TO GOD, KATIE, GET YOUR SKINNY ASS BACK TO YOUR APARTMENT NOW!!!!!!)_ , “I’m more worried that she’s going to hurt herself, than anyone else. She’s never been all that good at self-preservation.”

_Ben Urich, you are making an already terrible situation so much worse._

“Anyway.” Ben cocks an eyebrow. “Arm?”

“You heard about the yakuza grabbing me, right?” He nods once. She waggles her broken hand. “Souvenir. They were super nice about it. Had me taped down and everything.”

Ben taps his thumb against the ignition. Then he turns in his seat a little. “Karen mentioned that the mask was the one to get you away from Fisk,” he says. “You hear from him lately? The devil.”

She looks at her burner phone. “Why would I?”

“Nice try, kid. But I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you. Besides, Karen gets twitchy every time I bring the pair of you up in the same breath.” He sighs. “What’s he been telling you? You hear anything about Fisk, about his movements?”

“Not really. Other than the whole thing with them being in the hospital for food poisoning.” She picks at the hem of her shirt.

“Food poisoning.” Ben scoffs. “Haven’t you learned by now not to trust the media? The inside word is that half the benefit was poisoned. People have died. Fisk’s girlfriend or fiancée or whatever she is, she’s been in the hospital for the past few days. I’m thinking that’s what has him so distracted.”

“Are you serious?” She swallows. “Holy shit.”

“Nothing from the mask, then.”

“Not really. He’s been pretty quiet since Nobu went up in flames.”

“Which you know nothing about.”

“Not a damn thing.”

Ben rolls his eyes. “And off the record?”

“Thought Karen would have told you everything, Mr. Urich.”

“Karen and me haven’t had much cause to talk, the past couple days.” He folds his hands around the wheel again, reflexively. “Not since the trip upstate.”

“To visit Mrs. Vistain,” says Darcy, and Ben makes another face.

“She told you? Would have thought she’d keep it away from you, considering the last time you came into close contact with Fisk you nearly lost the use of your left hand.”

“I’m a big girl, I can keep up. Besides, we have a deal, at the firm. Tell everyone everything, even if it only can be used as hearsay. That way we’re all straight with each other and know what each person is planning on doing next.” Like Karen, punching Matt in the face. She bites her lip. “Ben, do me a favor? Be careful, okay? Karen—Karen has reason to think that Fisk might know about you and her visiting his mother. And if his people fucked me up this bad just for looking into the yakuza, I can’t think what they’d do if they manage to track you down.”

Ben gets a hint of a smile around his eyes. “I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive, kid. Not the first time I’ve had someone come after me for learning things they’d rather not have me know anything about.”

“Yeah, but Fisk’s—” she doesn’t know how to say it. How can she describe him? She’d only spent five minutes with him, hurt and bleeding and deathly scared that she was going to die, that Matt was going to die. There’s no way to form an opinion of the guy from an experience like that. But still, she licks her lips. “I get the feeling he’d be more likely to rip your head off than give you a tap on the wrist and ask you to play nice with the other kids. He’s done it before.” Pause. “The head thing, not the—not the tap on the wrist. Though if he tapped your wrist he’d probably break it, the guy is hella huge.”

Ben makes a face. She wishes she could convince him, but there’s nothing else she can really say. If she tells Ben that Karen was threatened by Fisk’s men, by Wesley, then what will he think, if Wesley’s death comes to light? The gun’s gone, there’s no way they’re going to track Karen down—not unless they fuck up monumentally—but Ben’s a smart guy, a lot smarter than he acts, and he acts like one hell of a know-it-all sometimes. She’ll be very surprised if he hasn’t at least put together that Darcy’s worried for a specific reason, even if she’s not saying it. Pulling Karen into it, that’d just be adding gasoline to the fire.

(— _the snap of breaking bone, blood on a hooked blade, Matt’s fingers fluttering against her ankle and the smell of burning flesh thick in her lungs as she stares down the dark side of an eclipse_ —)

“You’re worried,” Ben says. Darcy nods once.

“Am I not allowed to be?”

“You’d be damn stupid if you weren’t.” Still, he gives her a long, considering look. “You have a reason?”

“Yeah, a good one. But I can’t talk about it. Not yet. Maybe not ever.” She clenches her hand into a fist. “Just—trust me, Ben. Please? Stay under the radar. Don’t—don’t stick your neck out. Not right now.”

He watches her until sweat beads up under her arms. Then he puts his car back in gear, swearing under his breath. “All of you, know-it-all kids,” he says, but there’s resignation in his voice that makes her heart jolt. “I’ll be careful. Might even get a hotel room, if you’re so worried. Have a few old IDs that I can mess around with, if I really need to.”

“You need to,” she says, thinking of Karen and the way her hands had clenched around an imaginary gun. “Just—just for a little bit. For as long as you can manage.”

“Don’t have a lot of money at the moment, but I’ll see what I can work out.” He glances in his rear view mirror, and then lays on the horn before pulling out into the jam of cars on 5th Ave. “You have somewhere to stay, too? Not just talking out of your ass?”

“But I’m a lawyer. It’s what we do.” Ben snorts, but gives her some serious side-eye, so she shrugs. “I have a friend I can stay with if it gets too hot. I can even go out of town if I need to. Now that Nobu—” her throat sticks. “Now that Nobu’s dead, they don’t care as much about me as they used to. Besides, off the record, I have someone keeping an eye on me.”

“Really,” says Ben. He turns on his blinker. “Y’know, heard an interesting story from a friend of mine down in the 15th Precinct. Said that a dealer came in last night, scared shitless. Told the sergeant at the desk that a woman with red hair and a black-and-white mask was working with the devil. Apparently she told the kid in no uncertain terms that if he did anything other to confess to all the shit he’d helped do—which was a lot, to be entirely honest, they’re going through a bunch of old cases trying to account for it all—he’d be in for a world of pain.”

“Hmm.” She turns her face to the window. “Red hair, huh? You sure the Black Widow isn’t doing some side work?”

“The Black Widow’s off the grid, last I heard.” She can feel his gaze on the back of her neck. “Somewhere in Eastern Europe, according to sources I most certainly do not have in Avengers Headquarters upstate. Anyway, even with Natasha Romanoff’s history, she doesn’t seem the type to work with a vigilante like the man in the mask. She’s been trying to go straight since the incident, maybe even before that. Masked asshole’s not her style.”

“Who knows what superheroes do. Or why.”

“Yeah, well,” says Ben, sounding far too knowing. “You ever meet this woman—she calls herself ‘Lilith,’ apparently—you let her know that there are a good half-dozen reporters wanting to talk to her. Since you seem to have been so lucky in coming across masks so far.”

“Only the one, and that’s only because I’m stupid.” She shrugs. “But, y’know, if by some miracle I get a lady saving my dumb ass the next time, I’ll definitely let her know.”

“All I ask,” says Ben. “Your friends were pretty crazy when the yakuza had you.”

She feels cold. The words drop into her head, hard and loud as boulders, and where they touch, tidal waves rise. _How did the TMZ interview go?_ she’d asked, and Foggy had said, _Kate was angry that I had to come instead of you. Also about the fact that you were kidnapped._ Kate, drawing an arrow back to her cheek, her eyes sharp and cold. _That guy, Fisk. He’s running all of it, isn’t he? He works with the yakuza, and with the Goodmans, and—and the Triad and the Russians and all of it. And you’re trying to stop him, and that’s why—that’s why they hurt you._

_Put an arrow in Rich Goodman’s fucking eye socket._

“Oh god.”

“What?” Ben says, but Darcy’s already whirling in her seat, lunging for the beat-up old N7 messenger bag full of her photos, her papers. The ones she’d picked up from Yoko, when she’d gone to see if the housekeeper had heard anything. Each of them have neat annotations of people, dates, addresses, case logs. There’s nothing missing, not that she can think of, but there are stars next to some of the names, men who have been released on parole, Russian names translated into Japanese and back out again, and she bites her tongue hard.

“ _Shit_.”

“Explanation would help, Lewis.”

“Fisk,” she says. “Fisk to Goodman to the yakuza to the Triad. Russians distributed in the city, Goodman-Okamura ships out of the country. Rich Goodman gets a cut of heroin to sell to his rich friends, let it trickle down through the club scene. Get people addicted, get them interested, tell them how to get more. I look into the yakuza, Nobu grabs me. O’Reilly would have told Kate that the Andromeda thing fell through— _shit._ Andromeda to Jenson to the yakuza to Goodman to Fisk.”

Ben stills, and looks at her. “You think she’s going after Fisk?”

“No, she’s not that reckless. She’s reckless, sure, but she’s not—” Her mouth is bone. “I had her translate some Japanese for me. Names, dates, places. She could have taken notes. She could have—she could be looking for people who can help—who she can get to talk about Goodman’s involvement. She could be going after yakuza men.”

“She’s not stupid. She can’t protect herself the way she’d need to, not up close and personal like that.”

“She can do a hell of a lot from a distance if she grabs an arrow or two,” Darcy snaps. She texts Foggy. _Ask Brett if there’s been anything going on with the yakuza today_. “She doesn’t even need to shoot at them if she doesn’t want, just follow them. Shit. _Shit._ ”

(New message to: Kate Bishop. _KATIE I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU ARE GOING AFTER THE YAKUZA ALL ON YOUR OWN I WILL END YOU BECAUSE THAT IS SO FUCKING STUPID I CAN’T EVEN._ )

“Yakuza have gone to ground since Nobu died. They have a few lieutenants giving them orders, but they’re contradicting each other, starting fights. She won’t learn much about Fisk from them either way. Fisk’s smart, he’d only deal with one or two out of the gang, not the whole of it. Besides, it doesn’t explain why she’d go after the Goodmans first.”

“Revenge isn’t good enough?”

“Revenge would end with them dead, not with one in the hospital and the other scared out of his wits.”

She can’t argue with that. “She doesn’t need Fisk, not really. She just needs a link to Goodman, who’s linked to Fisk through James Wesley.” _Who’s dead._ “Fucking _shit._ God, I’m going to _kill her._ ”

“Kate’s tough. She’s smart. She won’t be so stupid as to stick her head out of cover.” He still looks troubled, though. The light in front of them turns red, and Ben hits the brakes right before he goes barreling out in front of a bus. “I’ll reach out to people I know. Whatever you say about the masks, Lewis, this might be a time to pull that thread.”

Her heart is porcelain, blown thin with too much heat. “I’ll look into it. Can you drop me at the office? I need to get some of my papers, try to figure out where she might be going.” Her phone buzzes. It’s Foggy. _Brett says no yakuza activity so far tonight. What’s going on??_ “Do you have any addresses, anywhere I could start looking?”

“You’ll be asking for a bullet in the head if you stick your nose in that kettle of fish, Lewis.” Still, he sighs. “Write these down.”

Karen’s still asleep when she gets back to Matt’s apartment, but Matt’s not. He and Foggy are actually talking, in quiet voices. She can hear them through the door, so she just goes through the roof access door instead, careful to not open it all the way so the hinges don’t squeal. Foggy abruptly shuts up as soon as she peeks in through the gap, and goes off to hide in the bathroom, probably to gather himself back together. She cocks her eyebrows at Matt—who’s all decked out in his man-in-the-mask outfit, minus the mask, which, _really_ , for someone who hasn’t seen and/or read _The Princess Bride_ is a pretty damn accurate modern rendition of the Man In Black—and then realizes he probably won’t be able to tell. “Well?”

Matt runs a hand over his face. “Truce. For the moment. What did Ben have to say?”

“Kate’s gone missing, someone shot arrows at Rich and Robbie Goodman, and I think she might be going after the yakuza to try and eliminate Goodman’s support.” She flexes her good fingers, dumping her purse on the couch. “Also, apparently Lynch ratted out Lilith at the 15th Precinct and Ben Urich wants an interview. Did Karen wake up?”

“ _What_ ,” Foggy says from the bathroom, but he doesn’t emerge, so she wonders if he’s just dropped something. Or found the considerable number of bloody gauze strips shoved into the waste basket. She should probably take those out.

“No. Still asleep.” Matt frowns. “ _Kate’s_ going after them?”

“I fucked up,” says Darcy, and her hands begin to shake. “I—I should never have asked her to translate those photographs. She figured it out, Matt, she knows who Fisk is, and I think—I think she’s going to try to use the yakuza to try and take out the Goodmans, or—or try to—I don’t even know what she’s trying to do, _that_ is how badly I’ve fucked up, I have no idea where she might go or what she might do, but if she gets hurt, it’ll be my fault, Matt, she’ll get hurt because—”

He reaches out, catching her by the shoulders. Darcy squeezes her eyes shut, wrapping her good hand hard around his wrist, squeezing until her knuckles hurt. He doesn’t react. “Breathe. Okay? Breathe. Where could she go?”

“U-Um.” She pulls back, grabs her phone. “I have—I have addresses, places Ben thinks she might start. Warehouses, like the one where Nobu—um. Old tenement buildings, ones that are scheduled for demolition. A movie theatre in Greenwich. Other places. He didn’t—he didn’t give me a lot, I think he was—I think he was trying to keep me safe, or something, which is the _last_ thing that needs to happen right now, I’m so _done_ with this—”

She realizes Matt’s not quite listening to her in the same moment he grabs his mask off the makeshift coffee table. “He’s still at the end of the block. I’ll get more addresses, check a few places out. Where are the Goodmans?”

“Our Lady of Mercy Hospital.” She fidgets. “I can—”

“I need you to stay with Karen,” he says, and she closes her eyes and swallows hard. “She needs you just as much as Kate does. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t talk to me, and she won’t talk to Foggy. She needs you here.”

Her throat goes dry. “That’s dirty pool, Murdock.”

“It’s also true,” he says. He tugs the mask on. Darcy clenches her hand into a fist and knocks it against his chest, once, lightly, careful to keep away from the marks she knows are still painful. Matt heaves a breath, and tucks his chin towards his chest. “Don’t do that.”

“What, hit you? Or be angry? Because I’m allowed to be angry.”

“You’re not just angry.” He touches a hand to her aching jaw, and she realizes she’s grinding her teeth. “Stop worrying. We’ll find her.”

“She’s been so hurt already. If she gets hurt again because of me—”

Darcy stops. She wishes, insanely, that he’d lie to her, say that they’ll find Kate before that happens, that it’s not her fault. All he does is step into her, wrap his arms around her, and Darcy chokes a little. He presses his mouth to her temple. “She’s going after the same thing we are. We’ll cross paths with her. We just have to be fast enough to catch up.”

Her nails catch in the fabric of his shirt. Darcy nods once. “I really don’t like being made to be a babysitter, Matthew.”

There’s a funny little hitch in his chest. “I need to know someone’s here to make sure they’re safe. Whatever happened to Karen—it’s not going to happen again. You three will keep each other safe. That’s why I need you here. It’s not babysitting, it’s guard duty.” He pauses. “Besides, I’m not taking a taxi over there, and you don’t have the shoes or the training you’d need to keep up, yet. And you're the only one I trust to make sure they're both safe until I get back.”

Whoa. There's—she's not sure she heard right, for a moment. "Flattery's not gonna get you anywhere, Matt."

"I mean it. If something happens, I know you'll get them out safe. That's why I want you to stay here." The rhythm of his heart under her ear doesn't change. "If you have to, and you can manage it, go to Claire's. If you can't, I'll find you. Okay?"

He's leaving them to her. He's leaving Foggy and Karen in her hands. There's something huge in that, she thinks. "Okay," she says. "Okay." She swallows, takes a breath of him, and then pulls back. “You’re gonna talk to Ben?”

“He’s hanging around. Probably waiting to see if you go anywhere else.” He heaves a sigh. “I need to ask him—he knows more about the city than any of us, it feels like. If anyone’s going to know the answer to my questions, it’s going to be him.”

“…yeah.” She nods. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll—I’ll stay here, with them. Every half an hour, you hear me? You miss a call, I'm leaving them at Claire's with Santino, and I'm coming after you. I don’t care if I don’t have the required badass level to manage it.”

“Yeah,” he says. He brushes his lips over her forehead, and then he’s gone out the window, and Darcy would swear at him for jumping _two stories_ with a hole in his side if he weren’t already out of sight. She swears at him anyway, because she’s pretty sure he can still hear her. Then she scrubs her sweaty hands on her pants, and slips into the semi-darkness of Matt’s bedroom.

Karen isn’t quite awake. She’s making soft sounds in the back of her throat, as if she’s having a dream. Or a nightmare. Darcy looks at the chair someone’s dragged in here (probably Foggy, if she’s going to be honest with herself) and then clambers up onto the bed on Karen’s other side, propping her back up against the wall. (New message to: Kate Bishop. _Kate, please answer me. Just let me know you’re alive._ ) Karen doesn’t twitch (more than she already is, thanks to her dreaming). Darcy hooks her earbuds into her ears, and turns on A Perfect Circle, as loud and as obnoxious as she can get it without going permanently deaf.  

Rich Goodman’s going to be arrested, she thinks. It doesn’t bring the sort of triumph it would have a week ago, a day ago, seven hours ago. Rich Goodman’s going to be arrested, but he’s going to be arrested while lying in his hospital bed with an arrow hole in his shoulder, bruises from his seatbelt snapping too-tight against his chest, whiplash and a concussion from the car skidding off-road and into a lamp post. It’s a miracle he’s even alive. Arresting that sort of Rich Goodman is different from the sort of Rich Goodman who’s arrested simply because the police can’t ignore shit like this any longer. She squeezes her eyes shut.

Is she a hypocrite, for wanting Kate out of this? Is she being two-faced? She’s not sure. She wants Kate safe. She wants Kate happy. She wants Kate to feel like she has a place in the world again, to know that she’s not just a victim. And she’s the last person on the planet who would tell Kate not to use violence, not with the feel of the taser still embedded in her palm. But—Jesus. None of this makes sense. Her brain won’t process it. _Overloaded?_ Maybe.

She texts Kate again. _Please just let me know you’re okay._

Foggy waves at her, but doesn’t come in. She’s pretty sure he’s trying not to wake Karen, which is a losing battle. She’s having nightmares, and there are only so many things Darcy can do about that without waking her up. She makes soft sounds, touches Karen’s hair. Sometimes it helps. Usually it doesn’t. By the time an hour’s up, Karen’s heaving in her sleep, her back contorting, eyes flickering like gunfire beneath the lids. When she jolts awake with a choked scream, it’s to find Darcy sitting there scrolling through Tumblr on her laptop, trying to watch as many cute cat videos as possible. She gulps air, and squeezes her eyes shut. Darcy thinks she might be about to cry. “Hey.”

“Hey, there.” Darcy closes the computer, sets it aside. She wants to say something witty, like, _So, how was your run last night?_ or _I hear you had a date with the devil_ but the first would be in incredibly poor taste and she’s pretty sure Karen will just haul off and punch her too if she uses the second one, so she grabs an extra pillow and folds it into her lap, desperately needing to touch something. “Hey,” she says again, and Karen finally looks at her. She looks away almost immediately, but it’s more than Darcy was actually expecting. “How are you doing?”

Karen actually seems to think about it. “I don’t actually know. Is there a word for this?”

“Off the top of my head? Traumatized.” Karen shakes her head once. “Nightmarish?”

“That sounds better.”

Darcy squeezes the pillow hard into her stomach. There’s a bruise on Karen’s clenched fist. Darcy looks up at Karen again, who is determinedly not meeting her eyes, and then touches the back of her hand, where the knuckles are swelling. Karen’s eyelashes flutter against her cheek. She sucks in a shallow breath through her nose. “How was punching Matt in the face? I’m pretty sure Foggy will cry when you tell him you did that, he’s been holding himself back for actual _years_.”

Karen doesn’t laugh. She looks resigned, instead. “Foggy’s here?”

“He was worried about you. Yeah, he’s here. He’s in the kitchen.” And has his headphones in, so he probably hasn’t noticed any of this. “There’s coffee if you want some. But it’s like…ten-thirty. So.”

“And the m—” Karen stops. “And Matt?”

“Out.”

Some of the tension leaks out of Karen’s shoulders. She still won’t look at Darcy. “Oh.”

 _Come on, Darcy. Say something._ She’s talked to women who have been convicted of murder, before. Oppie had taken her up to a women’s penitentiary occasionally, to help run a legal procedure awareness group with convicted victims of spousal and intimate partner abuse. Day By Day stuff. It’d been about as far from _Orange Is The New Black_ as you can get, concrete and hard eyes and frightened looks from some of the girls in their group. Some of them had only been a little older than eighteen; women (none of them trans; no, the trans women had been sent to men’s prisons, raped and assaulted and battered all over again because some fucking judge had looked at them, at their faces and their families and the people who’d accused them, and judged the way all ignoramuses judge) who had killed in self-defense or in revenge or to protect their children. They’d all had this same hollow look that’s hanging on Karen’s face, now, like they can’t see why they’re worth saving. Darcy swallows, and then lifts her hand, giving Karen time to jerk away. She brushes some of Karen’s pale hair back out of her face, hooking it behind her ear. “Hey,” she says again, and Karen blinks slowly and looks at her, her eyes wet. “You’re okay.”

“No,” says Karen. “No, I’m. Uh. I’m really not.”

“Well, you’re gonna be.” She leans her cheek into Karen’s shoulder, ignoring the stiffness of her, like rigor mortis has already set in. Darcy hooks her good arm around Karen’s waist, drawing her thumb along the line of one of Karen’s ribs. Karen, who isn’t ticklish, doesn’t even twitch. “We’ll get through this, Karen. Okay? We’ll figure it out.”

This time when Karen takes a breath, it trembles. She rests her jaw against Darcy’s scalp. “Why are you being so nice to me?” she says, and Darcy can feel the words all through her, almost as if they’re a strike. “You shouldn’t be so nice to me.”

Darcy strokes her back for a minute or two, just thinking. Karen’s picking at the back of her hands, at scabs that weren’t there last night. She wonders if Karen hurt herself, running away from Matt. Or maybe she’s just been scratching at her own skin, trying to claw the darkness out. Darcy sighs, and puts her good hand on Karen’s knee, palm up. She waits until Karen takes her hand, and laces their fingers together. “Because you’re you,” she says. “Because we’re friends. Because you deserve nice things. That’s why.”

Karen flinches. Then, slowly, she creeps closer, until she has her arms tight around Darcy’s waist and her face hidden in Darcy’s throat, her whole body quaking like a leaf in a hurricane. Darcy draws her fingers through Karen’s hair, humming quietly. She’s not sure what the song is, but she thinks it might have come from some kid’s movie she’d seen a long time ago, about trains and princesses and dancing bears. She’d watched it in Russian, she remembers that much. She thinks Karen might be crying again, but it’s the silent sort of tears that never go acknowledged by anybody. Foggy’s watching them from the living room, his game of Candy Crush forgotten in his hands.

 _She okay?_ he mouths, and he looks so desperate that she’s tempted to just lie to him, to tell him _yes_ and maybe come close to believing it herself. She doesn’t, though. Darcy strokes Karen’s hair, and shakes her head once.

 _No_ , she mouths back, and Foggy’s face hardens, as if it’s being etched out in bone. He shuts his eyes tight, and rests his forehead against the heels of his palms, breathing slow and deep, trying to keep himself from panic. She’s half-tempted to gesture him over, have a Nelson-Lewis-Page cuddle puddle in the middle of Matt Murdock’s bed, but she knows for a fact that Karen will freak out again if Foggy gets near her right now. She’s not sure how she knows, but she does. Maybe it’s like the reverse of what Darcy had said to Father P, back in the church. Maybe the goodness in Foggy, the innocence that he still has, maybe it makes him the north end of a magnet. And maybe Karen’s terror and the guilt that’s crushing her, maybe that makes her another sort of north end. Magnets like that can only repel each other. For ten minutes or twenty or an hour or a day, Karen needs as much space as she can get, and Darcy can give her that as best she can.

_I’m not a hero or a vigilante or a badass or even a very good friend, but I can damn well help her get through something like this._

Because if she’s going to be totally honest—with Foggy, and with herself—she’s not sure she’s going to be able to keep herself going if Karen breaks down. She’s really not sure of that at all.

.

.

.

When she’d been seven years old, her dad had taken her and her mother up to a cabin in upstate New York, and taught her to shoot.

Kate can remember the snow most vividly, the way it had come nearly to her waist as they’d waded through it. Her boots had pinched her feet uncomfortably, and her too-short hair left her ears to freeze in the frost. There had been maybe a foot of powder on the ground, a foot and a half, but her father had insisted on taking his son (the thing that she’d never been, but she’d let him call her that then because she hadn’t known how to correct him, yet) out hunting, because that’s what his father had done for him, and his grandfather had done for his father, all the way back to whenever the hell the Bishops had come to the States.

Dad had been giving her guns, then. The thing had felt like poison in her gloved hands. She hadn’t known how to hold it without dropping it, and her father had been very irritated until she’d aimed and fired at a knob on a nearby elm tree, and had actually managed to clip the thing. It had been an incredibly lucky shot, but she’d made it, and her dad had been so shocked that he’d forgotten to take the gun from her until she’d fired it three more times. (Semiautomatic, not the sort of thing that should have been taken on a hunting trip at all, but then again, her dad’s an idiot who likes to act like he knows more about the world than he actually does.) She’d hit the thing twice by the time he finally shouted at her to stop and knocked the gun from her hands. She can still remember the feel of the triumph, sharp and sour in her mouth, at the look on his face.

That feeling’s never quite left her, she thinks, as she crouches on the edge of the roof, her quiver heavy against her back. _Breathe in. Hold. Listen to the air currents. Draw. Feel the way the muscles in your arm tense and tug, settle your shoulders into position. Your eyes have never left the target. Release your air and your arrow at once, as if it comes straight from your lungs, as if it’s a barbed word from your tongue. Breathe in._ She can’t explain it to her father, can’t try with Yoko, either. She’s never even tried with anyone else. The only person who’d ever managed to get it had been the shortest-lived of all the teachers her father had hired for her, and Kate has no idea where she even is. Danielle had dropped off the face of the earth years ago, to wherever it is that people go when they have inexplicable psychic (and psychotic) meltdowns in the middle of the work week.

Still, Kate thinks, as she rests her bow on her upraised knee, digging her binoculars out of her bag. She doesn’t need other people to understand her feelings to appreciate them herself.

It’d been easier than she’d expected, figuring out which room Rich had been assigned to in the hospital. They’d sent him to Our Lady of Mercy, and since he’s still sedated, he’ll be in the ICU. Our Lady of Mercy is where she’d gone for her transition surgeries; she knows the inpatient-outpatient wards like the back of her hand, even from four stories up and two buildings down. And sure enough, it only takes about an hour of wandering around in a blonde wig and sunglasses before she passes by a door guarded on either side by big, beefy men in expensive suits with bluetooths connected into their ears. It makes her think of _Terminator_ , for some reason. They ignore her, and Kate spends an hour in an empty hospital room just to give herself some cover before walking right past them and back out the doors again. After all, his bodyguards are white. They can’t get her to the yakuza.

(She could play the simpering female and get in without an ounce of trouble. She knows it, even if they don’t. She could bat her eyelashes at them and say something about _oh, but I’m just so worried about Richard_ , and they’d let her in, and she could slit his throat and go out the window without them even realizing what she’s done. A part of her wants to. It’s large and seething and coiled inside her, burning, and she _wants_ to. She wants to the way she’d wanted to shoot him in the throat, back on that rooftop the arrow drawn back to her cheek, hate ready to fly. She’d shot them to distract them, to get them out of the way, but oh, god, she _wants_ to. She wants to hurt them like they hurt her. She hears his father speaking to him as she passes his room, and she breaks out in a cold sweat. Kate tugs her hat low over her eyes, and makes herself swallow. _I am not what you did to me,_ she thinks, and she turns and walks away. _I’m not a victim. I’m not your victim._

And the thing is, she actually believes it.)

Now she’s perched on top of a water tower on the other side of town, watching the moon and waiting for the meet. There are a lot of people in this city who’ll give you whatever you want to know if you aim an arrow at their throat, she’s found. Kate’s used to getting what she wants, but even by her standards, they give up very easily. There’s a suspicion that this is all a trap, lingering in the back of her head, but she ignores it. She’s half a block away and four storeys up; she’ll see anyone coming a mile off.

When she’d liberated her bow from her father’s safe room, she’d borrowed a few other things as well. She’d thought, back then, that maybe she could use the bugs as collateral for the Goodmans; maybe tape a few of their conversations, get them to roll over out of court. (She’d hoped they’d never be that desperate, but Kate thinks ahead.) Now, though; now there are three bugs on the walls around the wide empty space where Hideo Kobayashi and Jack Matsuhara are going to be meeting. Why they need to talk out here when they presumably have offices, she’s not sure. She knows from Brigid and the police reports that Kobayashi and Matsuhara have bad blood between them, though, so a peaceful office? Yeah, probably not be the best place for a meeting that might turn into a shooting match.

Her phone buzzes on her knee. It’s from Brigid. _You’re scaring people shitless, girly-girl. Call me back._ Brigid could have her phone tracked and her ass in cuffs in half an hour if she wanted (she has pull in the tech department in the 34th) but she hasn’t, and Kate appreciates that. She’s pretty sure Brigid has some idea of what she’s doing, and doesn’t want to get in the way. And Darcy’s figured it out, or at least part of it, but she’s stopped texting. The ache gnaws at the base of her throat.

She hears the crunch of tires on concrete on her bluetooth before she sees the car pulling into the lot. Kate draws an arrow from her quiver (an insurance more than anything; she wants to hear what they have to say, only shoot if she has to) and nocks it to the string. These are her hunting arrows, the ones her dad bought her for her seventeenth birthday in a vague attempt to rebuild their relationship. They don’t match the bow—the heft is wrong, the shafts too bright—but they’re not as unique as her own fletching, and they have barbed, wicked, viper-headed tips. (She’d be lying if she says she doesn’t want to make them hurt.) A car door slams. The audio’s coming through perfectly. Two men clamber out of the backseat, one of them older. The other has dyed blonde hair.

“ _Kono kussoyaro_ ,” says the older one, and kicks a Coca-Cola can. Even if Kate’s Japanese is kind of limited, especially in regards to dialect, that comes through loud and clear. _This fucking bastard._ “ _Nanno tame ni kono kitanai basho de aitakatta ka. Wakaran.”_

Wow, okay. Yoko doesn’t talk nearly that fast. Something about—something about dirty places and why they’re meeting? She thinks. _Wakaran._ Wakaranai? _He doesn’t get it._ She misses half of what Blondie has to say, and hates herself. _Should have been paying more attention, Bishop._ She makes a mental note to switch her language credits from German to Japanese.

“— _uragiru tsumori deshou ka_?” Blondie finishes. _Betraying? Betrayal? Something about betrayal._ “ _Shinjiru koto ga dekimasen yo._ ” _You can’t believe him._

“ _Urusai_ ,” says the older dude, and Blondie falls quiet. She thinks these two might be Kobayashi. Nobu’s factions are more like a braid than a tapestry, three major threads that were woven together underneath Hironobu Orihara’s leadership. They’re fraying apart again now that he’s dead, falling into disarray. The Oriharas are taking the lead again, slowly, but the Kobayashis and the Matsuharas are clashing between themselves. _So much for family loyalty._ Aren’t yakuza supposed to be aspiring to be samurai, or something? Loyalty’s supposed to be a big part of that, isn’t it? She makes a mental note to go to the library when she finishes this. She needs to learn more about gang culture before she actually starts to analyze this shit.

Another car pulls up, an expensive black thing (she can’t tell the model from up here, but she thinks it might be a Jaguar of some sort). Three men get out of this one, two dark-haired, one old enough that he’s grey all the way through, to the point of his mustache. When she looks through the binoculars, he has a little beard that’s combed to a precise point, like Hercule Poirot’s mustachios. The Matsuhara. She hooks her bow over her upraised knee, and presses her bluetooth closer into her ear. 

“ _Machikudasatte doumo arigatou gozaimasu,_ ” says the elder Matsuhara, tipping his head a little in an aborted bow. _Shit, something about thank yous? Machikudasatte, kudasaru, kudasai, please, matte means wait, so thank—thank you for please waiting? What the actual fuck_ —

“ _Hanasugiru, jiji_ ,” says Blondie, and the two men on either side of Matsuhara bristle visibly, even from this distance. She thinks one might be longing for a gun. “ _Nani ga hoshii no?_ ”

“I think,” says Matsuhara, in even, unaccented English, “it would be better if we set aside the pleasantries.”

Blondie and the older Kobayashi look at each other. Then Blondie steps forward. He’s first generation, she thinks. There’s a swagger to him that most non-Americans can’t even try to copy. _Because America is possibly the most self-absorbed nation on the planet._ “Fine,” he snaps. “What the fuck do you want, old man? You’re the one who dragged us out here at ass o’clock at night for no _fucking_ reason—”

Matsuhara glances at one of his lieutenants. Then he shakes his head, slowly. Kate can see a bead of sweat sliding down his jaw through her binocs. “No,” he says. “You are mistaken. You are the ones who summoned us here.”

“What the actual fuck,” says Blondie, and yeah, she’s getting sick of Blondie. She’s itching to draw her arrow back. “You called us. You said you wanted a meet.”

“ _Matsuhara-san, kochira ni—_ ” says one of Matsuhara’s guards, but then glass and plastic shatters. Someone’s knocked out the streetlamp. Kate can’t help it; she jumps, and one of her arrows slides out of the quiver and falls off the edge of the water tower. There are shouts and bangs coming through the bluetooth, and when she presses the binoculars to her eyes all she can see is flashes. Then she catches a glimpse of black, black shirt, black mask, and her heart seizes in her chest. _Devil._ The devil of Hell’s Kitchen, here, why _here_ , why would he come _here,_ why _now_ , why any of this?

Kate swears, and stands, shoving her binocs back into her bag, but then another gun goes off and she can’t resist. She raises her bow, pulling the arrow back to her cheek. The scrape of the fletching makes her think of scales. There’s a rattling from a semiautomatic, and she sees one of the men, Blondie, raising his gun in the flickering lights. She fires. The arrow takes him through the wrist, nailing him to the wall. She doesn’t stop to think, just draws and aims and fires again, and this time it’s one of Matsuhara’s men, the one that’s still standing, that’s pinned to the side of his car with an arrow in his shoulder. They’re screaming. The devil stoops, sweeps the other bodyguard’s feet out from under him, slams his head back into the concrete, and vanishes into the darkness again. The light from the inside of one of the cars casts a pool of liquid yellow light. It’s almost like gold. Blondie’s swearing constantly under his breath, at least, for a minute or two. Then there’s a small cry of pain, and he falls silent. Somehow, it’s more chilling than a scream. She draws another arrow from the quiver, but it’s quiet, now. There’s no movement. Whatever the devil was doing, he seems to have finished his work.

Time seems to hang itself when she sees him step into the light of the car. He’s all shadow and darkness at this distance, and when she grabs her binoculars, when she peers at him, he doesn’t change a bit. There’s blood on his lip, bruises down his cheek and jaw. He’s dark, she can see that much. White, or Asian, maybe. He flexes his hands, and then turns in a slow circle, as if he’s searching for something. He’s holding one of her hunting arrows—yellow fletching, blood dripping from the tip—in one hand. He lifts the bolt, and then his other hand, which has a cell phone in it. Then he drops the arrow to the ground (she hears it clatter through the bugs) and presses a button on his phone. She almost screams when her cell buzzes in her bag.

Her hands are shaking, but she answers.

“Dangerous, to be alone in this part of town on your own,” he says. It’s vague, choppy, pitched low. She doesn’t recognize his voice. Kate swallows hard, and licks her lips.

“See, I feel like you should be telling yourself that. You’re the one who decided to get into the middle of it. For, y’know, absolutely no reason. I _was_ listening to that, you realize.”

“I was doing my job.” She lifts the binoculars to her eyes again. He’s searching the rooftops, as if he’s searching for her. Kate ducks low against the curve of the water tower, and he keeps on looking. “I was looking for you, and I found you. Job done.”

She clenches her hand tight around her cell. “How the hell did you get this number? This is private, not on any registries.”

“We have a mutual friend.” Kate presses her binoculars close against her face, pinching them against her skull. He’s tapping his phone with his forefinger, not trying to get her attention, just an odd nervous habit, maybe. She puts her phone on speaker, and then sets her binocs aside, drawing an arrow and setting it to the string. Kate blows her bangs out of her face. She can draw and hold an arrow for at least five minutes, if she has to, but it’s bad for the bow, the muscles in her arms are still complaining from her climb up onto the tower, and she doesn’t actually want to shoot him. She’s pretty sure putting an arrow in the devil of Hell’s Kitchen would count as a crime against the city, or something. Besides, Kate’s done her homework. She knows that Darcy’s probably alive twice or three or six times over because of this guy, even if he blew up half the Kitchen. She owes him for that. “I need to talk to you, Bishop.”

“Yeah? So talk.” The devil shifts, as if he’s going to step out of the light, and she draws the arrow back. “Move and I put this through your eye.”

The devil makes an odd sound. It takes her a moment to realize that he’s laughing at her. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He raises his free hand, spreading his fingers wide. “I’m unarmed. And unmoving. And yes, before you ask. I’m alone.”

“Fine.” She lets out a breath. Kate eases the bowstring forward, keeping her arrow nocked even as the point rests on her knee. It scuffs over her leggings, fraying thin threads. “What do you want from me, devil? If you’re just here to tell me to go home, then go fuck yourself. I have just as much right to be here as you do. More, actually, because I actually understand Japanese and could have figured out what the fuck they were talking about.”

He doesn’t say anything. He just cocks his head, as if he’s asking her a question. Kate huffs. “What?”

“They were here to be killed.” It’s so _weird_ , talking to someone like this. She feels like she ought to be climbing down from the tower, so she can at least look him in the eye. Though she has a feeling he would be avoiding that at all costs. Then what he’s saying processes, and her bow is slick in her hands from how much her palms are sweating. “They were meant to murder each other, start a war, to keep them from focusing on Fisk while he’s still so vulnerable. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen according to the man I spoke to earlier tonight. Sniper,” he says, and points at a window in the building below her. “Set up there. He’s been waiting for an hour with an infrared scope. He was going to take out the lights, and then kill Matsuhara and Kobayashi when their men started shooting.”

Kate swallows hard. “What did you do to him?”

Through her binoculars, she sees his mouth quirk. “You want the long answer or the short one?”

“Let’s go with the Cliff Notes.”

“Then I did what I usually do.”

“You hurt him.”

“Not as bad as I could have, considering he was looking to start a war in the Kitchen,” says the devil. “Snapped his shoulder, snapped his wrist. Clipped him in the knee too hard, he’ll need physical therapy. Broke three ribs. His nose, when he wouldn't shut up.”

“Sounds like you tore him apart.”

“He’ll live.” His voice dips lower. “Which is more than what he was going to do for Hell’s Kitchen. Do you know what would have happened to this city if Nobu’s top men had turned on each other? Especially right now?”

“We would have all lived in rainbows?” says Kate, but her voice shakes. “I know it would have been bad, I’m not stupid.”

“It would have made the bombings look like sparklers,” the devil says. “Without Nobu to keep them in check and with Fisk out of the way, they would have torn the city apart. Hell’s Kitchen would have been ground zero. They’d rip the whole of Manhattan to shreds. What I did to the sniper? That was a kindness. He’ll live. His family will live. And maybe next time he’ll think more about picking up a rifle and using it to start a war.”

She’s not sure whether to be frightened or in awe. She picks irritated instead. “But why would they kill their own allies? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Hironobu Orihara was loyal to Fisk for a reason. The Matsuhara and the Kobayashi were only loyal to Nobu. My guess is Fisk is cleaning house. Or his men are, on his behalf. He’s a bit distracted at the moment.” He tips his head to the other side, and for some reason she could swear he knows precisely where she is. He’s just ignoring it. The thought makes her skin creep. “I’ve been doing this longer than you, you know. You learn to fact check before charging in, guns blazing.”

“Yeah, like…three whole months. Wow, such badass. Very knowledge. Experience amaze.”

He ignores that. “Taking a few potshots at a pair of rich entitled assholes is different than putting yourself on the yakuza’s shitlist. Because they would have found you out eventually. Maybe not tonight or tomorrow, but they would have figured it out when the cops started raiding their warehouses.” His mouth twists. “I’m assuming that’s what you were planning eventually.”

“Not exactly. I wasn’t planning on them noticing me at all, to be honest. Which you fucked up, by the way. Thank you.” She rests her bow on her knee. “Besides, I have excellent insurance.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” The devil closes his raised hand into a fist, and then releases it. “If Fisk learns that you’re going after his men, you’re probably going to end up with a broken neck. He has a history of tearing people’s heads off for less.”

That, she’s never heard about. Kate swallows again. “I’m not going after Fisk. Not yet.”

“Then you’re going after the Goodmans.” His voice sounds the way a punch feels, all sharp knuckles and dull pain. She thinks he might actually be angry with her—not just the idea of her, but _at_ her, as if he has a reason to care. Why, she can’t even imagine. She doesn’t think he’s the kind of person to try and head another vigilante off at the pass. (Not that that’s what she’s doing, she thinks, but then she remembers the rush when her arrow had landed precisely where she’d aimed, right in the engine, and the next pierced through glass and flesh and leather to pin Rich Goodman to the seat as the chauffeur swerved wildly off-course, and even if she’d only meant it as a warning, even if she’d only intended to scare them a little, get them out of the way, she can’t imagine herself regretting it if they’d all died in that single, endless moment.) “You’re going after the Goodmans to—what, put them in jail? Make them suffer? Get to Fisk?”

“Maybe I just like eavesdropping on people,” she says, and he coils like a cobra.

“Bullshit. What the hell are you doing out here, Bishop?

Her phone buzzes. When she looks down at the screen, there’s a text from Darcy. _I’m going to punch you in the face, Bishop, I swear to atheist-god. ANSWER YOUR PHONE BEFORE I PUT AN APB OUT ON YOUR ASS YOUNG LADY._ Her throat squeezes uncomfortably. She draws a deep breath, holds it, and then lets it free again. Kate turns the phone off of speaker, pressing it against her ear. Her bow she rests against her legs, curving beautifully against the dark fabric of her pants.

“Kind of a long story,” she says. Down in the parking lot, the devil lowers his hand to his side. There’s blood streaked over the bone of his jaw. She’s not certain he’s even noticed.

“Try me,” says the devil.

.

.

.

It’s three in the morning and Foggy has dozed off on Darcy’s shoulder when the roof access door creaks open, and Matt slips in through the gap. Karen glances at him and then quickly away again, staring hard at the screen of Darcy’s computer (Darcy had decided a _Parks and Recreation_ marathon was in order, because she still hasn’t heard a word from Kate), her lips going thin. Darcy sets her fingers to Karen’s arm, just for a moment, and then passes the computer and Foggy off to her. Foggy, who can sleep through a hurricane, doesn’t even notice the trade, and in spite of the magnet deal, Karen doesn’t yank away. Instead, she steals the earbud out of his ear, and hooks it into her own, because yeah, fuck the police, she’s the only one watching at this point. Darcy brushes her lips over Foggy’s scalp, and then Karen’s (Karen goes still at the touch, but gives Darcy a quavering smile anyway) before crossing the room to meet Matt at the bottom of the stairs. “No new bruises,” she says, quietly. “Well done.”

Matt tugs the mask off, keeping his face turned towards her. She’s pretty sure that Karen’s watching them, but when she looks around, those baby blues are fixed on the computer screen. “How are they?”

“I mean, they could be better.” She sighs. “They might be plotting to smother me in my sleep for hovering, but they’re not screaming or running in terror, which I am deciding is a positive. What did you find out?”

“More than I thought, less than I wanted.” He pulls his gloves off, and holds them loosely in one hand. “The yakuza are fighting amongst themselves. Nobu’s dead and they don’t know why. And whatever they want from Fisk, he hasn’t given it to them yet. They’re not happy about any of it, they don’t trust each other, and I’m pretty sure someone’s trying to get them to kill each other.”

( _—the cool agony of the blade through her palm, the feel of her own knuckles brushing against her skin as Nobu bends her finger back, back, back—)_ She shakes the cobwebs out of her head, and swallows. “Define ‘pretty sure.’”

“There was a meeting between two major yakuza families tonight. I found a sniper, supposed to start a fight between them. They were _supposed_ to kill each other, start a war between two factions. Clear the way for whoever it was that hired the sniper.” He rubs a hand over his face. “If they’re fighting, it explains why the yakuza have left Fisk to cool his heels. But it still doesn’t explain why they were working with him in the first place.”

“Other than general nastiness?” She shrugs. "What did Ben have to say?”

Matt hooks his pinky around hers, just for a moment. Then he lets go. “A lot. Is there any coffee?”

“It’s cold. I was going to make more.” She licks her lips. “Any sign of Kate?”

She sees a muscle twitch in his temple.

“Matt?”

“I don’t want to have to explain it more than once.”

“Is she okay?”

He sighs. “Yeah. I mean, I think she is. Just—I’m gonna shower. You’ll still be awake?”

“You actually think I’d be able to sleep?” She steps away from him. “There’ll be coffee when you get out. It’ll wake Foggy up without actually, y’know, physically waking him. I think we have him programmed like Pavlov’s dog and the steaks.”

“You’re the one who programmed him, so don’t drag me into it,” he says, and, well, yeah, that’s technically true, so she can’t argue with it. Matt rests his hand on her shoulder, and then slips away into the dark, soundless even in his heavy boots. Karen hits the space bar on _Parks and Rec_ , tugging the earbuds free. There’s an odd look on her face that looks unsettlingly like an _aha, I knew it_ moment. Darcy scowls.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She shakes her head. “It’s—it’s weird, seeing him in that. That’s all.”

“Is it?” says Darcy vaguely, and heads into the kitchen. She takes particular pleasure in hitting the button on the coffee grinder, because it means that caffeine is on its way. Also because the noise makes her brain shut off, so she doesn’t have to think about what _I mean, I think she is_ means. “I mean, yeah, the mask freaks me out too, a little, but like—I don’t know. It makes sense, in a weird way.”

“If you say so. I’m still stuck on the _blind vigilante_ bit.” Karen heaves herself up off the couch. Foggy sits up straighter. Darcy’s pretty sure that if she could see his face, he’d be all sleepy-bear, squinched eyes and half-open mouth. Karen crosses her arms over her chest and pads into the kitchen to watch Darcy work. “It’s easier to think about than everything else.”

“You’re taking it better than Foggy. Then again, you did get a chance to punch him in the face.”

“He followed me over two chain link fences and into a dead-end alley, he deserved to get a knuckle sandwich.” Karen huffs. “I honestly thought he was gonna kill me. That the papers were right and he was some kind of bad guy. He just _wouldn’t go away_. Scared the fucking shit out of me.”

“Mfgh,” says Foggy from the sofa, and drops sideways until he’s staring at the ceiling. “What the fuck time is it, even?”

“Three-oh-five,” says Darcy, and she’s really fucking chipper about it, too. “Want coffee?”

“I swear to god, I’m going to say something snarky and biting and really, really epic as soon as my brain kicks in, but for now all I have to say to you is _oh my god yes please_.” Foggy does a weird backwards somersault off the couch, lands on his knees, and brushes his hair back out of his face. “Ow.”

“You idiot,” says Karen, but it’s affectionate. “You drooled on my shoulder while you were asleep, y’know. Because you’re a dick.”

“There was a literal avalanche of dick jokes in my head just now, but I’m going to hold them back. Because I am tired and would probably mess them up. Still, they’re awesome, so pretend I said something funny.” Foggy tucks himself onto one of the bar stools on the other side of the counter, and rests his head on his arms. “Guh. Speaking of, where’s the Dick In Black?”

“Shower.” Darcy turns on the sink, and glances at Karen, but the shaking, frightened woman from hours ago, she’s hidden away. Darcy legitimately can’t see her anymore, and that somehow frightens her more than if Karen was curled into a corner screaming. “He said he found some stuff out that he wants to talk to us about.”

“I’m holding back dick jokes again,” says Foggy, though how that makes any sense on the planet, Darcy doesn’t know. And she’s the one who taught Foggy like…more than half of his dick jokes. They used to have big drawn-out dick joke competitions instead of studying. (In all actuality it’s a miracle any of them graduated cum laude, or graduated at all, considering how much shit they pulled.) “Stuff like what? Stuff like Fisk stuff?”

“He didn’t say.” She throws the beans back into the fridge, and knocks it shut with her hip. She thinks that Karen and Foggy might be talking with their eyebrows behind her back, but when she turns around, they’re each staring at their own separate bits of the counter, Not Talking. They’re Not Talking very loudly, though.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” she says, and goes to grab Fred, her laptop, and the iPod she’d liberated from Mathias Lynch out of the bedroom. When she returns, the water’s boiling, and Karen and Foggy are bickering quietly over a gang of hangman, which seems to have been Foggy’s peace offering. _Hey, sorry for scaring the shit out of you and making you run off into Hell’s Kitchen in the middle of the night, and by the way, no, there’s no X in my eight-letter word._ Surprisingly enough (or not, considering Karen’s acting skills) it seems to be working. It goes a long way to explaining why a woman as smart as Karen page would pick an X in a gang of hangman, anyway.

They’ve made it through the first word ( _disaster_ ) and are more than halfway through the second (which Darcy suspects is _sesquipedalian,_ but she’s not about to give that one away; watching Foggy be confused is too amusing) when Matt reappears, his hair still damp and his red-lensed glasses settled on the end of his nose. He’s only halfway dressed, his shirt catching on some of the gauze that’s been taped to his back. Darcy’s pretty sure Karen nearly drops her mug of coffee at the sight of the bandage, but she covers it wonderfully with a loud cough, so she can’t be absolutely certain about it. Foggy’s lips tighten at the bruises, but he just says, “So, what’s the verdict, Batman?”

“I’m not Batman,” says Matt, with a pained sort of expression.

“He doesn’t have the funds necessary to be Batman,” says Darcy.  

“No,” says Foggy, only half-joking. “You’re more Red Hood, I think. All the violence, none of the law.”

“We’re not going there right now,” snaps not Darcy, but Karen. She folds her hands around her mug again. “We’ll talk about it later, Foggy. Okay?”

Foggy watches her with raised eyebrows, but he nods once, and stares into his coffee mug again. Karen crosses out the letter _I_ on her hangman sheet, and marks it off in two places.

“What did you find?” says Darcy, because there’s not really much else she can say. On her computer, iTunes pops up with a display box to let her know that Mathias Lynch’s iPod has been synced to her music library. She has to come up with a name for the thing. Maybe Velma? Fred and Velma. _Jesus, Darcy. Focus._

“Kate’s going after the yakuza,” says Matt without any sort of preamble, and she’s seriously going to kill him, because _in what universe is that okay, Matthew Michael Murdock._ “She thinks that if she goes after the yakuza dealers, she’ll be able to track down the Triad production lines, and if she can track down the production lines, she can isolate them from each other, the Goodmans, the Triad, and the yakuza.”

It’s not just what she feared. It’s a million times worse. “She can’t do that all on her own,” Darcy says. “They’ll kill her if they catch her, and she can’t just—it’s the middle of the semester, people will _notice_ if she goes missing, she’s not exactly anonymous now that the TMZ interview’s dropped, and—Jesus, if she’s doing this because of—”

 _Me,_ she nearly says. But while she’s self-absorbed, and she admits it, she’s not _that_ narcissistic. If there’s anyone Kate’s doing this for, it’s herself.

“She’s trying to make things harder on Fisk, isn’t she?” Karen says. “She thinks that a war on three fronts will stretch him too thin, and he’ll break.”

“She’s thinking of it like pieces on a chessboard when reality is so much harder than that, though,” says Foggy. “And if she gets caught—”

“If she gets caught then what will happen to her will happen to the rest of us, because I’m not about to let her go down for us.” Darcy closes her hands tight around the edge of the counter. “She’s trying to be a one-woman army and that’s the last thing we need right now."

“Jesus,” says Foggy. “Who thinks that they can be a—”

He looks at Matt, and then closes his mouth with visible effort.

“I’m not unaware of the irony,” says Matt, in a chilly voice. “She’s agreed to keep out of sight for now. I couldn’t convince her to go back to her apartment, not yet, but she said she had somewhere to go. She wasn’t lying.”

Karen shakes her head. “You don’t know that.”

Foggy makes an awkward noise in the back of his throat. “He kind of does.”

Darcy ignores this. “She was okay? She wasn’t—she wasn’t hurt or anything, was she?”

Matt shakes his head. “I had to break up a fight. She helped keep people off my back. She’s a good shot. I think she was at least a hundred yards away and she still managed to pin a guy by the wrist before he could shoot me in the back.”

She’s not sure which of them turn whiter, Karen or Foggy. Darcy wishes she could put her hand across the counter, squeeze Karen’s wrist, but that would be so, so obvious, and even if she’s willing to pretend that Matt doesn’t actually _know_ about Karen killing Wesley (he hasn’t given any indication either way, which is making her nervous), she doesn’t want to slip Foggy any clues. What happened with James Wesley, that’s for Karen to explain. Not for her to give away. “Oh my god,” she says. Her brain is swimming. “I’m gonna strangle her.”

“She did well.” Matt tips his head at her. “She was out of sight and managed to help.”

“I’m still gonna strangle her. She attacked the Goodmans, went after gangsters— _oh my god._ ”

“I am sensing some distinctly unhealthy vibes from you right now, Lewis. I would suggest yoga, but I get the feeling that you would hurt yourself.”

“Bite me, Foggy. She’s been ignoring me all day so she can eavesdrop on the fucking yakuza? I thought she was lying in a ditch somewhere! Fucking hell. I’m going to choke her with a shoelace. Or a garrote. Or the power of my love.”

“One of these things is not like the others,” says Karen into her mug, and Matt’s lips twitch.

“She’s alive.” Darcy closes her eyes. There’s something pressing in her throat that might be her heart. “She’s alive. She’s safe. Jesus.” She’s going to faint. “God, this week is—this week is the worst. What did you hear from Ben?”

“Kate has the right idea.” Matt grabs the coffee mug she’s set out for him without feeling around for it. Karen watches him with a look dawning on her face that Darcy doesn’t recognize. It’s almost her world’s broken to pieces, and she’s fitting it back together in a new pattern. _Did I look like that, when Matt told me the truth?_ “The Triad is one of the last lines of defense that Fisk has at this point. His girlfriend’s in the hospital, he killed off the Russians, the yakuza is going to fall apart without Nobu—”

“Who the hell is Nobu?”

“Friendly neighborhood bully,” says Darcy, and flashes her cast at Foggy. Foggy’s mouth goes thin.

“—and there’s no way that we’re getting at Leland Owlsley, he’s too well protected.” Matt scratches at a scab on his jaw. “The Triad is everywhere. I made a deal with Kate—she’s going to try and track down the dealer angle with Goodman-Okamura, and I’m going after their source, try to shut down the production. The more we push Fisk, the angrier he’ll get. If we frustrate him enough, he’ll make a mistake. He has to.”

“There’s no guarantee of that,” says Foggy. “Then again, anyone who chops the head off of a Russian mobster with a car door doesn’t have the best life planning skills.”

“It’s not much of a plan on our side, either.” Karen stirs more sugar into her coffee. “There have to be dozens of warehouses all across the city. Big-time dealers like them don’t just have one lab.”

“I know.” Matt’s mouth tightens. “But it’s the only thing I can think of. Clearly nothing else has worked so far. I think—I think there might be a way in. Ben mentioned blind couriers. The Russians herded them around sometimes. If I can find one of them, I can track down their drug labs. And if I find the labs—”

“—you hit Fisk where it hurts,” says Darcy. She doesn’t look at Karen. “I really don’t like that Kate’s getting involved in this. If she gets caught—”

“She won’t,” says Matt, and she’d kill for his confidence right now. “Having her track down the buyers and dealers for the Goodmans, it’ll give her something to do other than bug gang meets and try to eavesdrop on bangers at midnight. I don’t like it either, but this way she’ll be distracted enough to hopefully stay out of the line of fire. Besides, she won’t be alone. She’s staying with Ben.”

Karen, who’d been lifting her mug to her lips, inhales her mouthful of coffee and chokes. “ _Ben_?”

“Can you think of anyone else who’ll keep a close enough eye on her that she’ll stay out of trouble but also let her run wild enough to keep her from going stir crazy?” says Matt, waspish. “Because I can’t. Besides, none of us should be alone, and if they stick together, they’ll be safer than going solo.”  

“So when you say _tracking down buyers_ , do you mean entrapment? Because she’s my client. I want to know what illegal things you’re making her do so I can defend her in court.”

“Technically we would probably all be defending her,” says Foggy. “Team of lawyers, remember?”

Karen stills. “Is that—is that still a thing? I wasn’t sure if that was still a thing.”

Foggy gives Matt a sideways look, and then stares at the floor, peering into the crevasse. Matt doesn’t do much of anything; he pushes his glasses up and then kind of curls in on himself, pretending not to hear anything, protecting the wounded places. Darcy presses a hand to her stomach, trying to push away the nausea. It doesn’t work.

“I’m still in it,” she says, and as one they both turn to her. Foggy’s eyes linger on her bruises. Then he meets her eyes, and she thinks that he’s actually really seeing _her_ , not her injuries, for the first time since she and Matt fell in the river. She hasn’t realized how often he’d been staring at her cracks and broken edges until this moment, now that he’s looking at her whole again. “If you guys are.” She holds his gaze for a moment, and then looks away. “Matt?”

Karen seems to be holding her breath as Matt lifts one shoulder, and lets it fall again. “I would understand, if you didn’t want to be. Either of you." Darcy rolls her eyes. She hopes he can hear it. “Any of you, actually,” he adds to Karen. “And—and I know that there’s no way I can get your trust back, not after something like this. But—yes. Yes, I would—I would like to be. If you all would.”

“As Matt?” Foggy asks. “Or—or as the devil?”

She feels like it’s going to shatter, then. Like whatever peace they’ve cobbled together is going to melt. Then Matt shrugs. “As me,” he says. “It’s not—it’s not as though we’re different people, Foggy. I’m the devil. The devil is me. It’s not—it’s not a different personality, or another person in my head. The devil is _me_. And it’s not changing anytime soon.”

Foggy looks like diet coke in the moments after a Mento’s dropped into it, before it erupts. He bubbles for a moment, and then goes quiet. Nobody says anything until Karen licks her lips. “You guys—you guys are the only good things that I’ve had since coming here. I’m not leaving that. Not if I can help it.”

Darcy leans over the counter, and grips Karen’s hand. Karen squeezes back hard, her eyes overbright. Her nail polish is chipped and dark. The shadowy part of Darcy, the Lilith bit, purrs. _Mine,_ she thinks. _My friends. Mine._ “You’ll always have a place with us, Kare,” she says, and Karen’s breathing catches. Darcy doesn’t let go. “Always, okay?”

She’s pretty sure Foggy’s sniffling, but by the time Karen’s steadied herself and Darcy gets to look over, his eyes are dry. He clears his throat. “So. Uh. What’s the plan?”

“I’ll track down one of the labs, see if I can find anything out.” Matt rubs his eyes underneath his glasses. “We’ll keep looking into Fisk’s mother, into whatever else we have. Andromeda, Tully, the Goodmans. We build it up on all three sides.” He pauses. “If you guys are all right with that, anyway.”

“Wait.” Foggy slips off his chair. “I was under the impression that this was your show.”

Matt shifts. His shoulders hitch up near his ears. “Yeah, well.” He clears his throat. “Democracy.”

Foggy blinks. His lips part. Then there are a whole cacophony of things flickering across his face all at once, confusion and exasperation and fondness and anger and a little bit of heartbreak and more than half a dozen more that she can’t make heads nor tails of. Darcy looks at Karen, but Karen’s biting her lower lip and staring out the window. The light from the billboard makes strange patterns over her cheeks. Finally, Foggy rubs both his hands up over his face and into his hair.

“Jesus, Matt.”

Matt doesn’t say anything. He hunches up like he’s waiting for someone to hit him (he’d probably break their hand before they can even get close to striking him, but holy _shit_ she never wants to see him look like that again). “I didn’t lie about that part,” he says, and he’s daring Foggy to tell him otherwise, his eyebrows magented together and his mouth pressed thin. “We’re not a tyranny. We’re a team. There’s—there’s a difference.”

Karen looks at Darcy. Then she reaches out, and catches Matt by the hand, squeezing once. He lets out a sharp breath and turns his hand over to clasp hers hard, and Darcy’s filled with such a tremendous stupid love for the pair of them—for all three of them—that she can’t breathe. “I think it’s a good plan,” Karen says. “Tell me what you need me to do.”

Foggy looks at her askance. “You’re seriously gonna do this?”

“I’ve done worse,” says Karen in a hollow voice. _Yet another thing on the list of “Things I Never Want to See/Hear My Friends Doing Again._ ” “Besides. We told Elena we’d get her her building back. If this helps with that, then hell yes, I’m in.”

Foggy looks at Darcy. Darcy holds up her hands. “Hey. I have a mask. I feel like my participation is required at this point.”

“Noted.” He looks back at Matt. “Can you tell the sort of face I’m making right now?”

Matt shrugs. “Mostly you’re blurry. So no.”

“I’m glaring at you.” He considers for a moment. “Wait, so the face touching thing is actually legit? You actually need to touch someone’s face in order to know what they look like?”

“Not exactly.”

“I feel like this conversation has derailed,” says Karen.

“Yes! Okay! I get sidetracked when I am very nervous and apparently about to join an illegal conspiracy. We will break many laws and possibly hurt people, I feel like nervousness is a reaction that natural, normal people have.” His eyes narrow. “Wait, when did I end up surrounded by abnormal people? When did this happen? How did this become my life?”

“Hey,” says Darcy. “You’re stealing my tagline.”

“Shut up, Darce, you started all of this. You and your making promises that can’t really be kept.”

“She did a good job keeping the one she made to me,” says Karen, and yeah, okay. She needs to hug Karen for that. Darcy comes around the counter and presses up against Karen’s back, wrapping her arms around Karen’s long neck and hiding her face in a sheet of blonde hair. She smells like the honey shampoo that Darcy left in Matt’s shower. Karen pats at her wrists and tips her head into Darcy’s to hide her smile behind her hair. Foggy throws up his hands.

“You’re all guilting me with guilting faces and I don’t appreciate it.”

“You don’t have to,” says Matt lowly. “If you don’t want to. I wouldn’t blame you for that.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” says Foggy again, and presses a thumb to his temple. “Yes, fine. I will join your conspiracy. But I swear to god, if we don’t get bagels, I’m out the door. No second chances.”

Darcy hiccups into Karen’s hair. “Fine.” Her voice is thick. “Fine. We can get bagels.”

“We will be the Bagel Brigade, for we are made mighty with the power of baked goods.” Foggy drops down onto his chair again, and folds his hands on the counter. “Speaking of other angles, there’s, uh. There’s something I’ve been working on that I should probably tell you about.”

Matt’s eyebrows snap together. “You’re nervous.”

“No shit,” says Foggy, whose voice has begun to crack. “You’re not gonna like it.”

“As long as you’re not desecrating dead bodies, there’s very little I could dislike at this point,” says Darcy. “Seriously. What are you even worried about?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:  
> “Kono kussoyaro. Nanno tame ni kono kitanai basho de aitakatta ka. Wakaran. _(This fucking bastard. Why the hell he'd want to meet in this filthy place, I have no idea.)_ ”  
> “—uragiru tsumori deshou ka? Shinjiru koto ga dekimasen yo. _(—think he plans to betray us? You can't believe him.)_ ”  
>  "Urusai. _(Shut up.)_ "  
> “Machikudasatte doumo arigatou gozaimasu. _(Thank you for waiting for us.)_ ”  
> “Hanasugiru, jiji. Nani ga hoshii no? _(You talk too much, old man. What do you want?)_ ”  
> “Matsuhara-san, kochira ni— _(Mr. Matsuhara, this way—)_ " 
> 
> One guess what Foggy's worried about. Hint: It starts with _M_ and ends in _arci_.
> 
> We're coming to the end here, folks. As of next chapter, I'm through with "The Ones We Leave Behind" (FUCKING FINALLY I SWEAR TO CHRIST PEOPLE JUST KEPT _DOING THINGS_ AND WOULD NOT LET ME FINISH). I've started the first of probably three chapters to cover _Daredevil_ , and then we're done. SO. Ending chapter count is projected to be at 22. I might squash two chapters into one to keep it even AND allow for an epilogue. I'm working on it. I feel like I need to watch the last two episodes before I post the next chappie, though, just so I don't feel like an asshole and get shit wrong.
> 
> (WHY DOES MY HOUSE NOT HAVE WORKING WIFI I SWEAR TO GOD)
> 
> I have had questions as to whether or not I plan a) a sequel for TPoW or b) to expand the universe. The latter I can definitely say yes to. The former is at about...80% yes? Obviously the second season hasn't come out yet and I would want to watch and revel in the glory of that (NEXT YEAR WHY) before writing a sequel. But I will have at least a) Karen punching Matt in the face, b) kitty!Matt crack fic, c) Darcy/Claire fic (thanks, TheQueenPi, for mAKING THIS HARDER THAN IT HAS TO BE), d) Matt's perspective on some of the Darecy scenes (and prequel stuff!) (on popular request) and e) Darcy/Matt training dorkfic. 
> 
> (They're such dorks, you guys. _Such dorks._


	19. In The Valley of The Shadow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Triggers for: PTSD flashbacks, some Fisk, some post-hospital nerve issues, discussion/alleging of rape culture. 
> 
> I had some questions last chapter about the "three years" comment Kate makes to Matt. I realized, upon looking them over, that you guys are probably correct; personally I place the incident with the father abusing his daughter at some time in college, because Matt's wearing his rectangle college glasses rather than his round red hipster glasses like he does at the firm. So, that point in the timeline doesn't change, exactly, but the violence he exudes scares the shit out of him enough that he holds off on being "the devil" until right at the start of the series. So yeah, I've edited it. 
> 
> More Vanessa! And Fisk actually shows his shy little babyface. Hi, babyface. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I've looked into PTSD for other stories I've written/am working on (I headcanon Steve, in particular, as having major PTSD for a lot of things) and obviously everyone presents differently, but if Melvin is in any way unbelievable/strange, please let me know. I am still learning, obviously. (I also think there's more going on with Melvin then just hella PTSD, but that's just me.) 
> 
> More canon divergence! Woop woop. Spanish and Chinese translations at the bottom! (Once again thanks to missingending, who is a delight and a darling and always gets back to me hella quick.)
> 
> ALSO NEWS AT THE BOTTOM.

They release her from the hospital three days after she’s been admitted, and Vanessa doesn’t go home. Rather, she doesn’t go back to her own apartment; she’s found that the cool modern lines of it, the sharp edges and the harsh angles, are exactly what she doesn’t need to see right now. It would remind her too much of an IV drip and the sting of antiseptic in her nose.

Wilson’s penthouse is just as modern as hers is, but it’s in a different way, she supposes; the warm dark greys, the heavy granite and the strict organization of it all are soothing in the same way Wilson himself is soothing, complexity wrapped in lines of simplicity. She lets him fuss over her on the elevator, lets him hand her into a couch, because she needs the touch as much as he does, to remind herself that she’s not shattered—at least, not in a way that she can’t put herself back together again.

She should be more disturbed, that she’s struck a bargain with the woman who tried to have her killed. It should worry her. But Vanessa’s not worried at all, and there’s something in that sure, steely knowledge— _Iris won’t try to kill me again_ —that helps her smile when Wilson cocks his head and asks if she needs anything.

“I need you to sit,” she says, and tugs at his hand. “And tell me what’s happened to have you acting this anxious.”

He wavers. He’s a large man, but somehow there are parts of him that are very small, and frightened. She thinks that’s part of what draws her to him, the bits that go against expectations, the secrets that she’s uncovered inside him. She’d thought she’d known how all men worked, before Wilson Fisk, but he keeps surprising her. She loves that. “I do not want to trouble you,” he says, slowly. “You are still recovering—you ought to be in the hospital.”

“Hospitals give me nightmares.” They have ever since her mother died when she was a child, cancerous and pale, bald in the middle of the sheer white bed, her hand closing around Vanessa’s as if it was the only thing helping her cling to life. “And you can’t hide anything from me, Wilson. Something’s happened, and it’s upset you. Please tell me.” She pulls at his fingers again, and he comes closer, silent on the tile. “You can tell me.”

“I know.” He lifts a hand, touches her cheek. Vanessa leans into it, luxuriating in it. The air around him seems to tremble. “But I don’t want to worry you.”

“You’ll worry me more if you keep hiding things from me, you know,” says Vanessa, and she makes herself as tart as she can without feeling like her tongue has been stung by bees. Whatever poison Iris had used, it lingers. She wakes at night with her spine snapping and her mouth open in a silent cry, molten metal pouring through her blood. “What is it?”

He wavers, but she can see that she’s beaten him in the line of his shoulders. Wilson sinks down to sit on the couch beside her, careful not to touch her. He thinks every touch from him will bruise her, as if his hands are only made for breaking. “The morning you woke up,” he says, weighing every word like it’s precious. “I found—Wesley had gone missing, the night before. We discovered his body that morning.”

Ice tangles around her throat. She’s only met James Wesley once or twice, outside of seeing him in Wilson’s shadow. He’d collected her once, to drive her to a meeting with Wilson in the Confederated Global building. And then the night everything had begun to fall apart, he’d come to her with his glasses slipping down to the end of his nose, desperately messy in spite of how neatly he’d put himself together. _Mr. Fisk needs you,_ he’d said, and she’d grabbed her bag and left without a single look back. She’d not known him well, she thinks, but she’d liked him. She’d liked the loyalty in him. “James is dead?”

“Murdered.” She’d call his voice a growl, but it’s more than that, something deeper, truer, wilder. She doesn’t know what other word to use. “He was _murdered_ , by men who hide in the shadows, who do not dare to show their faces. All he ever did was try to help me, and now he’s dead.”

Vanessa studies him. There’s hate written into the lines on his brow, grief in the creases around his mouth. She rests her head against his shoulder, playing with his fingers. “Who do you think it was?”

“Leland believes it was the Japanese.” He doesn’t seem to realize he’s telling her this, when he’s previously been so careful to keep her from the realities of what he does. She hopes he doesn’t notice. “I don’t agree with him. The Japanese would have left some sort of sign, a message, to let me know that they are finished with my work, and have decided to become my enemies. This—the scene around him was untouched. There was nothing left behind. He was left there to rot. If not for the tracker in the van, it could have been days before he was found, and then—”

He looks sick. She curves her hand around his cheek. “Hey,” she says. “You found him. And you have somewhere to begin looking.”

“Without Nobu, the Japanese are falling apart.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “I wish I didn’t need Nobu’s people. The men he brought with him from Japan—his decoys, really, not his true men—they are petty, caught up in their own squabbles. Nobu was barely able to keep them in check when he was alive. Now that he’s dead, there is no one to keep them from imploding. I’m half-tempted to let them. It would be cleaner, result in less…mess.”

“Is there a reason why you can’t?”

He turns to look at her, eyebrows rising. “I did not think you would be interested.”

“I’m interested in everything you do, Wilson.” She presses her lips to his shoulder. “But if you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to.”

Wilson looks genuinely disappointed. “I have made a promise not to discuss it until the time is right. I wouldn’t hesitate, if circumstances were different.”

“And for right now, that’s enough for me.” She smiles into his suit. “I’m sorry about James, Wilson.”

She can feel his muscles tensing under her hands. “I didn’t know he’d asked you to call him that.”

“He said that he didn’t think I would be leaving for a long time, and that there was no point in not being on first name terms.” She closes her eyes. “But he never called me anything other than Miss Marianna.”

Tension still coils in his arms. She rests her palm against his elbow, breathing him in. “He was my friend.” He says it so simply, as if it’s a universal truth. “I cannot help but think that the poisoning at the benefit and the attack—and Wesley’s death may be connected, somehow. He went off alone, with a gun and a car, with no word as to where he was going or what he intended to do. And if someone is attempting to have me killed, then Wesley would have been my last line of defense. It’s possible—it’s possible he was killed as a sign, a signal to me, that everything I love is vulnerable. That I am not untouchable.”

She rests her chin against his shoulder, thinking about that. Iris is the one who poisoned the benefit, presumably to kill Vanessa, but there’s something in Wilson’s words that makes sense. “How was he killed? James.”

“They shot him,” he says. “In the chest. Used the full clip on him at point blank range. They would have had to been standing right in front of him, to watch the light fade from his eyes.” He chills. “I will find those who did this to him, and I will rip them apart with my bare hands.”

Vanessa closes her hand into a fist and then opens it again, relishing the pull of muscles under skin. “What are you going to do?”

“Wesley spoke with my mother before leaving the hospital. She is—unclear, still, as to why he had reason to call her. I am waiting until the nurses bring her medication later this evening. Hopefully she’ll be clearer, then.” He turns, pressing his jaw against her scalp. “Until then, I will stay with you. The doctors said that we must watch you, to ensure that you do not relapse.”

“And if you stay here, you’ll spend the whole time fretting.” She waves this away. “Leave one of your men with me. I’ll be fine, Wilson. I’m safe in your apartment. This is the safest place in the whole city, for me.”

“I will not leave you alone. Not so soon after—” He breaks off. “Not so quickly.”

“I’ll be fine alone.” Vanessa lifts her hands to his face, smoothing her fingers over the lines beneath his eyes. “At least for a little while. And you must find who has done this thing to our friend. You _have_ to. I want to know that they suffered as much as James did, before they died.”

He kisses her then, his hands sliding up into her hair. Vanessa presses her tongue to the seam of his lips, relishing the shyness in him. She wonders sometimes if he’s never truly been with anyone before her, if he’s always kept himself apart. She knows that he’s had other women, but relationships, feelings, _need_ like this—she’s fairly certain that’s foreign to him. He makes a small, soft sound against her mouth when she hooks her fingers into the lapels of his suit, and pushes her gently, inexorably back. “You are not well,” he says. “I would not hurt you.”

“You can’t hurt me.” Still, she listens. Vanessa leans into him again for a moment before pushing at his shoulder. “Go. Look for the people who killed James. I’ll still be here when you finish your work.”

He wavers, but she can see the way his eyes dart to the door, as if he’s been waiting for permission. “I will leave two men outside the door,” he says, “and two will remain in here with you. I would not have you harmed.”

“And they’ll be certain to keep me in one piece until you’re finished.” She can’t help but smile. “ _Go_. I’ll be right here when you get back.”

He presses his lips to the back of her hand, and then he’s gone. Vanessa stays sitting straight until she hears the front door shut, and then she lets herself sag, leaning into the pillows and trying not to wince at how tight her skin feels. She’s certain that the hospital had said something about putting enough fresh blood into her to completely flush out the remnants of the toxin, enough blood that she probably has none of her own left in her veins, but she _hurts_. “There will be some nerve damage, but that will heal with time,” the surgeon had said. “You will hurt, but you’ll pull through. You just have to be careful with yourself.”

She’s never been all that good at being careful with herself.

It takes her a good twenty minutes, but she manages to retreat to Wilson’s bedroom, button herself up in one of his shirts, and curl around one of the pillows in the bed without help from anyone, and without screaming at the touch of cloth on her skin. She takes her phone to bed with her, scrolling through the contacts. There are a few new ones, now. She doesn’t erase James Wesley’s, ignoring the way her heart pinches at the sight of his name. _I barely knew him_ , she tells herself. _I don’t have a reason to grieve the way Wilson does._ But she is grieving a little, for the loss he’s experienced, for the horror of James’s death. Because it _was_ horrible, if what she’s heard her guards saying has even an ounce of truth in it. She hesitates over her assistant manager’s name—she’s certain one of Wilson’s men would have contacted the gallery, told them she was in the hospital and they would have to reorganize the shift schedule—and then sends Pieter a text to let him know that she’ll be out for the rest of the week as part of her recovery before moving on.

There’s a new number underneath the Gs, one she can’t remember inputting. _IG_ is the only attachment. Vanessa’s lips part, and she rolls onto her back to look at the ceiling for a long time. _Rabbit In A Snowstorm_ hovers in her peripheral vision, all subtle lines and elusive colors, and she can understand why Wilson would hang this picture in his bedroom. It’s powerful, soothing. A steadying influence. She rests her thumb over the entry in her address book and watches it for a minute or two, wondering if this is what Wilson does when he sleeps in this bed, if he looks at the painting and thinks of her.

She hits _accept._

The phone only rings twice before there’s a sharp click. For a moment, she thinks neither of them will speak. Then Iris sighs. “I had not expected to hear from you so soon.”

“I made the hospital release me.” Vanessa curls tighter around the pillow, twining the end of it between her legs. “I don’t like hospitals.”

“They serve a purpose,” says Iris shortly. “And thus they’re worth our time. Does he know that we’re speaking, you and I?”

“No. Someone murdered James Wesley. He’s out looking for the bastards that did it.” She presses her cheek into the silk pillowcase. “Which I assume you already knew.”

Iris says nothing for a moment. “I had nothing to do with Wesley’s death. It saddens me to hear that he has been killed. He was—” she stops. “He was a good ally. He never treated me with disrespect.”

Vanessa blinks at that. “Do many people disrespect you?”

Iris laughs, low in her throat. “Tell me, Miss Marianna. How many people disrespect _you_?”

Vanessa opens her mouth to deny it, and then closes it again. Because when she stands on the sidewalk, men whistle. Because when she gets in a cab, she hears them shouting. She walks by a construction site and moves faster. Before Wilson she’d never quite felt like she could leave her house at night alone. She knows, now, that she’ll never have to, but the feeling still lingers. How many times has her opinion been dismissed by her supervisors, by the men around her who think that because she’s good at lipstick and wears tight dresses that she’s not worthy of any sort of attention other than the lascivious sort? She’s embraced it, made it her power, but it still makes her sick, the looks on their faces. It’s a performance, always. Don’t talk too loud, don’t talk too soft. Don’t be too angry, don’t be too shy. Not too pretty, not too fierce. Not too ugly, not too sweet. Not whole, but not broken, either, don’t be broken, because if you’re broken, if you show your weak spots, if you show that people can hurt you, they’ll think that they’re entitled to it. They’ll take advantage of it, and you, because a strong woman is only strong until someone angry, someone hateful and jealous and cruel, finds what could be a crack in her armor and exploits it until it becomes one.

She’s never let someone find a crack in her armor. She’s not even sure Wilson knows she has any.

“More than I would like,” she says, after a full minute of silence. Iris hums again. It seems to be the answer she was expecting.

“When I am done with you, they never will again,” Iris says. “How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been run over by a semi-truck.”

“So, better then.” Vanessa hears a burst of Chinese on the other end of the line. Then it quiets. “Why did you call me, Miss Marianna? If Wesley is dead, there will be much to do, and I do not have time for a social call.”

“You said you were going to teach me how to survive.” Vanessa pushes her hair back behind her ears. “I didn’t think about it, then, but I want to know what you meant.”

“Is it not enough that I have promised to teach you how to live in this world you’ve immersed yourself in? Why do you need to ask why? You will learn the tactics you need to survive. It’s a better bargain than you will get from the rest of them, and I made it only because you demonstrated yourself to be more than what any of us expected.” Iris clicks her tongue against her teeth. “There’s no need to discuss it until you’re well enough to begin.”

“Are you going to teach me to fight? To shoot? To—to run the business? Why are you even doing this for me? What would be the point?” She picks at the hem of her sleeve. “What is it that you want me to do that you can’t ask Wilson for?”

If not for the constant, low-level chatter on the other end of the line, she would think that Iris has hung up on her. It feels as though she’s trapped an hourglass, and time is dripping, speck by speck, into her hair like so much sand. “Did Wilson never tell you what faction I am from?”

She blinks. “No. He doesn’t mention many of the people he works with. I assumed—” _the Triad, the tongs, the gangsters of Chinatown._

“You assumed,” Iris repeats. “Yes, many assume. I come from somewhere beyond any place you know, Miss Marianna. The people I bring to this country, they have few opportunities, fewer chances at life. They are the forgotten children from the slums, those with hare lips, twisted legs, fractured minds. Gays, lesbians, every queer identity I could find. Prostitutes, addicts, people no one wants, in my world. In this new one I give them a purpose, a job that needs doing, and they are grateful for it. Society tells us that there is no better place to be than America, land of the free, home of the brave.” She doesn’t laugh. “No one talks about the filth, the intolerance, the lies. No one mentions the guns lying in the street and the monsters waiting in your bed. I bring people here to sell them lies as truth, but I am here because I aim to find the truth in lies.”

Vanessa closes her eyes. “That’s all very poetic, but it still doesn’t answer my question.”

Iris laughs, crackling. “That’s just a polite way of saying I’m full of bullshit.”

In spite of herself, she feels her lips curve up. “You said it, not me.”

“They expect it from me, your men and mine, and so I give it to them. I’ve worn this skin for so long that I find it has become…difficult to say entirely which part is truth and which is not.”

Vanessa nods into the pillow, turning to stare at _Rabbit In A Snowstorm._ “You’re searching for something. An object? A person?”

“It is complicated,” says Iris. “In short, Miss Marianna, I was lied to, many years ago. The man who did it came here. I am looking for him. He knows that I am here for that purpose, and so he hides from me. But he would not hide from a woman like you.”

“And what sort of woman am I?”

“One with power,” Iris says. “One who knows her own strengths and weaknesses. One who’s shown herself to be willing to cross the moral Rubicon of society without looking back.”

“You want me to be your weapon.”

“I want you,” says Iris, “to be my spy. You were not my only option, but I feel that you will be the best suited to it.”

“But you’re not asking me to spy on Wilson.”

“Not Wilson Fisk, no. Another man, one who has cloaked himself in shadow for many years now. He’s begun to stir only in the past few months, but I will not be able to remain here to watch him.” She sighs. “The net is tightening, and the smarter fish slip free before it closes.”

“How mystical.”

“You will not be unarmed. I will teach you. My men will teach you. You will learn how to fight, how to defend yourself. How to kill, if you wish it. We will give you the tools you need to place yourself firmly beside this man you have chosen for yourself, and in return, you will search for another man on my behalf.” On Iris’s end, there’s a metallic clang, as if someone’s dropped a soup can. “It is an equal exchange of efforts and allegiances.”

“Less equal than it would have been if you hadn’t poisoned me first.”

“The two are separate circumstances.”

“Seems cold-blooded of you, Iris.”

“I was born as such.” She coughs, quietly. “I must return to my work. Do we have a deal, Miss Marianna?”

She fists her hand up underneath Wilson’s pillows, and considers. He won’t be happy, to hear that she’s putting herself in danger like this. But she won’t be vulnerable again. She refuses to become a weakness for him, refuses to become his open wound. She refuses to allow people to think that there may be cracks in her armor. “Find one man, in a world of over seven billion,” says Vanessa. “Now, how hard could that be?”

Iris laughs, low and soft. “ _Chángjiāng hòulàng tuī qiánlàng_.”

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“It means go to sleep, Miss Marianna. My men will find you when they arrive.”

“You sent for special men, just for me?” Vanessa snorts. “I feel like I should be flattered.”

“I will speak to you when I can,” says Iris, and with a click, she hangs up. Vanessa looks at the dull screen of her phone, at the blinking _call ended_ signal, and then lets it rest on the sheets, rolling onto her side so she can best count the number of brush strokes in _Rabbit In A Snowstorm._ She’s barely made it to a hundred before the pain puts her to sleep.

.

.

.

“When were you going to mention that you and Matt are together?”

It’s a miracle that Darcy doesn’t drop her coffee on her computer, that’s how much it takes her by surprise. They’re sitting at the rearmost table in Mug Shots, papers spread all around them and Darcy’s laptop set up in the middle of the table. To be honest, she probably should have been expecting it—Karen’s been giving her inscrutable looks for a full day, as if Darcy has an unexpected tattoo on her face or something—but she hadn’t expected it to be that fucking _blunt_. She swallows her mouthful of Americano. “Give a girl a little warning, Page, Jesus.”

“I didn’t have a chance before.” Karen gives Marci (at the counter, complaining about the _exact temperature of her latte)_ (Marci is the customer every barista hates) a significant look, and then leans forward. “That’s—that’s new, isn’t it? That wasn’t happening before.”

Darcy clears her throat, and starts shuffling papers. “I feel like this is not a discussion we should be having when we are surrounded by piranhas.”

“The piranhas aren’t paying attention. Besides, is there actually going to be another time to have this discussion?” Karen stirs her coffee. “It’s not as though we’re certain that any of us are going to live through the next few days. Besides I—I could use something normal to talk about.”

“I see no part of my life as normal at this point.”

“You know what I mean,” Karen says acidly. “Considering we picked this table in the back because the last time you were in here you were nearly sniped.”

Darcy considers. “You may have a point.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you two are together, finally—”

“—what the hell do you mean, _finally—_ ”

“—but I guess I’m just kind of surprised. It’s not exactly the best time to start figuring out a relationship. Especially with—y’know.”

Darcy wrinkles her nose. There’s an implication in that statement that she’s not sure she likes a whole lot. “I guess—I mean.” The grain of the table is suddenly very fascinating. “It’s—I don’t think it’s ever really going to be a good time. Considering everything. But it happened, and it’s happening, and I don’t—” She bites her lip. “I want it. So there’s that.”

Karen searches her eyes. “You guys have talked about this, then.”

“Yeah, sorta. Mostly we haven’t really had the chance, with Fisk and everything. But there’s been, y’know, communication, which is fascinating because most of my relationships are sex-dinner-sex-don’t call me sweetheart. I talk a lot, but communication is kind of foreign territory for me.” She makes her voice spooky. “ _Here there be monsters._ ”

Karen’s pale eyebrows lift. “Sex-dinner-sex-don’t call me sweetheart?”

“It’s a technical term.” She pinches a bit of Karen’s scone off and retreats before Karen can smack her hand. “And I guess, y’know, with Matt I have an advantage of having known him for so long. I know most of his bad habits already. I guess?”

“You don’t sound very sure.”

“That’s because I’m not, but don’t tell anyone. I’m a lot less decisive than I sound most of the time.” Which is not what she’d meant to say at all, and honestly is way too insightful for this early in the morning, but it’s out in the air, now. Nothing she can do about it. “We’ll probably have more time to go over everything once—once this is done with. But for now it’s what it is.”

Karen sips at her coffee, and hums.

“How did you put it together, anyway?” Darcy glances back over at Marci (god, she hates hanging out with Marci just because of the rhyming jokes, people looking back and forth between them when they introduce themselves, _hey, are you guys related?_ Because no. No, they definitely are not.) and then lowers her voice. “I wanted—don’t tell Foggy. It’s something that Matt and I have to do, I feel like.”

“Yeah, no, of course.” She whacks Darcy’s hand when Darcy goes for another bit of scone. “I guess I’m just—you guys are all really close friends, but it was just different, I guess. You’ve always stood close to Matt, but—but he’s never stood close to you, before? I don’t know if that actually makes sense.”

“No, it does, weirdly.” She sighs. “I was going to tell Foggy first. He—I owe him that. After everything that we’ve done to him, you know? That’s—that’s something I owe him.”

They fall into a quiet, peaceful silence for a moment. Karen scrolls through whatever article she’s reading on her computer, something from the _Bulletin_ about Russian gang movements, pre-decapitation and explosions. Then she looks up at Darcy again. There are shadows in the hollows of her face, and her eyelashes flicker. “He loves you guys, you know,” she says. “It’s why he’s still helping. I don’t know him as well as you do, obviously, but even I can see how much he’s hurting because of this.” She chills, her face turning to marble. “Don’t hurt him again.”

She wonders sometimes what’s going on with Karen and Foggy, if they’re actually having a thing or if it’s just wishful thinking, if that’s something that could happen or if it’s only ever going to linger in the nebulous realm of possibility. That doesn’t matter at the moment. What matters is that Karen (one of hers, one of her people) is defending Foggy (her brother, one of her people), and even if it hurts that she has to do it, it’s so, so satisfying. Darcy doesn’t blink. She only nods. “Of course not.”

“Of course not what?” says Marci, and drops down hard into the empty chair. Her latte has a very unhappy looking smiley face woven into the froth on the top. Darcy glances over at the barista (Kimmy of the spiked porcupine hair) and makes a disparaging face. Kimmy drags her forefinger across her throat, and flings her hands up in the air. “Come on, you’re not going to expect me to keep my nose out of it when you two look so intense. Am I interrupting a Sapphic bonding moment?”

“Fuck off, Marci.”

“Oh,” Marci coos. In her big-ass sunglasses (designer brand) and the brunette wig she’s scrounged up from somewhere to keep anyone at Landman and Zack from tracking her down, she looks like a curvier Audrey Hepburn. She’d had dark hair in law school, but not quite this dark. That had partially been why people had constantly mistaken Darcy and Marci for sisters; their natural hair colors were almost exactly the same. “ _Good_ girl, Lewis. I’ve missed the sheer, unadulterated hate in your eyes when you look at me. _So_ much.”

“Yeah, well, if there’s one thing I don’t miss about law school, it’s the fact that for seven months I had to tolerate your idiocy on a daily basis.” She eyes Marci. “You used to be nicer. And not evil.”

“And you used to care about how you look, but clearly we’ve both changed.” Marci pushes her sunglasses down so she can peer over them, and clucks her tongue against the back of her teeth. “People grow up, Lewis. Being nice doesn’t get a girl anywhere in this world. You should know that better than anyone. Besides, evilis only a point of view.”

“Y’know, I never would have thought _you’d_ be the one to fall into the clutches of internalized misogyny. Guess I shouldn’t have expected so much from you.”

Marci’s eyes tighten. “And yet here I am, with a job, and a career, and a shot at partner someday, and here _you_ are, in an ugly little coffee shop and what I can only presume is a boyfriend that beats the shit out of you, coagulating in your own failures.”

“And _o_ kay, we’re—done with that conversation.” Karen closes her file, not looking at either of them. Under the table, she digs her fingernails hard into Darcy’s knee. Darcy closes her eyes, breathing hard and fast through her nose for a few seconds. When she opens them again, Marci’s smirking. “Whatever the hell you guys have going on, there’s—there’s no time for it right now. All right?”

“Please, Barbie.” Marci hooks the dark hair of her wig behind her ears. “I’m so far beyond this already that I should be in the stratosphere. Foggy-bear told me to come and meet with you guys, but I still don’t understand _why_. It’s not as if there’s anything I can really do at the firm, aside from accidentally maybe getting copies of certain documents that could _probably_ lose me my job. And, y’know, thanks for expressing your appreciation of all I do for you, Lewis. It’s very heartening.”

“Wow,” says Darcy, her voice dead. “How did we ever manage without you, Marci?”

Marci’s painted lips curl back from her teeth. “Guess you’ll never know, now, will you?”

Karen makes a noise in the back of her throat. It’s almost a snarl. “As fun as it is watching you two taking potshots at each other like middle schoolers, there’s actually a city we’re trying to save, so if you could grow the fuck up, that would be nice.”

Darcy wrenches her eyes away from Marci with an effort, and sighs. “Yeah. Okay. What did you find for us, Marci? In your definitely not-illegal workplace shenanigans.”

“Please, you’re making it sound like I slept my way to the top. Which, FYI? I didn’t.” She dumps three files onto the tabletop. “There’s only so much I can grab at once. See, yesterday afternoon when Foggy-bear called me, he showed me some stuff about what you guys were looking into, all the—all the stuff about Fisk. And most of it, y’know, I didn’t take seriously at first. I mean, you’re getting most of your evidence from a fucking whack-job who runs around in a ski mask and puts people in the hospital. That’s totally someone you want to see on the witness stand. But when I was going through the papers for Confederated Global today, I found some stuff about that sports company that you were looking into. The Wendels.”

“Wexlers.”

“Whatever. Not my case, not my problem.” She taps at the Landman and Zack logo with one viciously red fingernail. “The business law department at Landman and Zack handles all the intra-company legal transactions, including the dissolution and resale of Wexler Sports Equipment into the Goodman-Okamura Trading Group. Most of Wexler’s shares went right into a slush fund for Rich Goodman—did you hear about that crazy Avenger that tried to put him in the hospital, by the way? It’s a shame, because even if he’s jailbait, the boy is a fine piece of ass—”

“He’s a rapist,” says Darcy. “Moving on.”

“Hey, even if he _is_ a rapist, he’s also hot. I have eyes.” As if to demonstrate, Marci rolls them up to the ceiling. “Whatever. I know you’re on your little white savior crusade to save the underprivileged people of color or whatever it is you’re doing right now—”

“—I’m half-Guatemalan, you asshole—”

“—whatever, girl, you’re white-passing, you don’t get to butt in on that convo.” She blows her bangs out of her face. “Most of the liquidated collateral from WSE went right into Rich Goodman’s trust fund, which he gained access to when he turned twenty-one last year, but some of it was funneled into this secondary fund, which the paperwork only calls the backup generator. It doesn’t show up all that often in the paperwork, either, which is why it caught my eye. When I looked into it—”

“You didn’t ask anyone to help, did you?”

“Jesus, are you joking?” Marci scowls at her. “No. I don’t want to actually lose my job, even if Foggy-bear does need my help. No, I can hack decently enough, and I know how to get in and out of the intranet without leaving a trace. So I looked into it myself. From a remote location with a burner computer that I stole off of one of the new techs, but I did it. There’s a _lot_ of money moving in and out of that fund, more than there should be considering how infrequently they talk about it. And all the account names are encoded.”

“That’s bank stuff, how the hell did you get into that?”

“Finance law.” Marci shrugs. “L and Z has their fingers in a lot of pies. Criminal, civil, business, finance, whatever, you name it, we have it. There’s a reason our building is so big.”

“I thought it was only because the partners wanted to pretend their dicks were the same size.”

“Hah,” says Marci. “They wish. Fucking skeezeballs.” She shakes her hair back out of her face. “But yeah, that’s what I have on Wexler. For Owlsley—”

“Jesus, there’s more?”

“What do you think I am, a novice? Of course there’s more. Leland Owlsley is the chief financial officer at Silver and Brent, he has a huge background with the firm. There were too many papers for me to go through in one sitting, but there’s more than enough that connects him to Confederated Global. There’s ties to Fisk—” she whispers the name “—on paper, at least. As for the yakuza and the Triad and whatever other gangsters the man is working with, I haven’t found anything like that, or if I have, it’s not obvious. I didn’t get a chance to photocopy that paperwork, there were only so many files I could take in and out of the storage rooms without people getting suspicious.”

“So what you’re saying is you believe that we’re telling you the truth even if it did come from—” Darcy hesitates. “From a psychotic whack-job in a ski mask.”

“Well, yeah. I wouldn’t be doing this otherwise.” Marci props her elbows up on the table, and over her shoulder, Darcy sees Kimmy do the fake throat slitting thing again. Apparently, the fact that Marci is letting her _specifically heated_ coffee cool without even touching it is a mortal sin. Which, actually, now that she thinks about it? _Yes it fucking is._ “It’s shitty, obviously. I mean, I don’t want to stick my nose in it, but whatever shit Fisk is pulling out of his butt, it sucks. I’m not a complete ass-nugget. And yeah, clearly you guys have been doing enough to get him pissed at you, so I’m scared to death that he’ll figure out I’m the one who gave you this stuff, but you know what? Screw him. I am a strong badass and I don’t need his fucking approval to do something right.”

Wow. Maybe Marci does still have a soul, after all. “Okay, then,” says Darcy. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Stahl.”

“What else do you guys even have? Foggy-bear gave me what he knew, but he said that you have more. And Matt probably does too, but you know, but whatever the hell’s going on with those two, it’s—actually, you know what? I don’t even give a shit. What do you guys have?”

And whatever evidence that Marci Stahl might still have a soul is officially gone. Darcy drops her head down onto the tabletop, and groans.

Marci ditches after about an hour (“I have to go to my _real_ job. My _money-paying_ job. The job that won’t end up with me _dead in a ditch_.”) so together, Darcy and Karen package up all their shit to drag it back to the office. It’s only once she’s apologized profusely to Kimmy and left as much as she can spare in the tip jar (it’s only three dollars, but, you know, everything helps) that she returns to Karen. “Well, that was a thing that happened.”

Karen’s lip is curled, as if there’s something nasty smeared underneath her nose. “Foggy _dated_ her?”

“She wasn’t actually that terrible in law school. She could be, you know, a major asshole when she wanted to be, but—she cared more, I guess.” Darcy taps the piercing in her nose. “She went with me when I had this done. Said she wished she was brave enough to do one herself. I remember she wanted to work in animal rights and environmental law. We didn’t get along very well—she gets possessive, and I’m pretty sure she thought I was sleeping with Foggy? Which is so weird, but, y’know, people think what they think. I didn’t like her all that much, but she was a good person in her own way, just…I dunno. I guess getting into Landman and Zack went to her head, or something. Slytherins don’t do the best with having more power than they can handle.”

Karen sputters a little. “Slytherins?”

“You look at her face and you tell me she’s not the biggest fucking Slytherin to ever Slytherin, Page.”

“…I don’t know how to respond to that.”

“That’s because you know I’m right.” Darcy heaves her messenger bag up over her shoulder. “Are you going to—are you going back to the apartment tonight? I know you slept there last night, but—yeah.”

“Yeah.” Karen glances out the window, as if she’s looking for eavesdroppers. “Yeah, I think so. I mean, pretending nothing’s happened is probably the best way to go about this, you know? And I just—yeah. I want to go home and watch TV and pet the cat and—and feel normal. Even if—even if the whole world is falling apart.”

It’s the most she’s alluded to Wesley and the gun since her meltdown in Matt’s bed, and Darcy’s not quite sure what to make of it. Karen closes her eyes for a moment, and grips the back of the chair hard, digging in with her fingernails. When she looks at Darcy again, there’s no trace of the greedy hate that’s been hollowing out her cheekbones, made it difficult to keep her still. They look at each other for a long moment, until Karen finally cocks an eyebrow at her as if to say, _What? I can be scary, too._

Darcy clears her throat. “Makes sense. It’s—yeah.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. Matt wanted me to meet him somewhere, but that’s at like…ten. And—and I haven’t heard from Kate at all, but I was thinking of maybe trying to get in touch with O’Reilly.” She’d also been thinking about visiting Father P at the cathedral, seeing if Tandy and Ty had taken her up on the suggestion of meeting at St. Patrick’s, but that’s something that can wait. “If I have the chance I need to go to court and try to wrangle a meeting with Moustakas’s clerk, since I don’t know if my client will be done, you know, _shooting cars_ by the time we have our preliminary meeting later this week, and oh, my _god_ , it’s so weird to think that I still have a meeting with Moustakas to wait for. Even if I already had to put it off once because of—because of stuff.” Her stitches itch. “And then I need to transcribe some of the recordings I took of the interviews, because they’re still sitting on my computer and I really ought to get hard copies of them so that if I drop coffee _again_ they won’t be lost to the ether. And then—”

“Jesus, slow down.” Karen’s half-laughing. “You ever think you do too much?”

“I’m a manager. I manage things. If I can’t manage things, I am not worth the title.” She wraps both hands around her takeaway mug. “I should probably just go back to the office and get started on all that to be honest, I don’t know if I’ll have time to do it later and if I can’t reorganize the meeting with Moustakas then I’m going to have to go in without Kate and Moustakas is gonna _hate_ that, but, I mean, I can’t exactly say _oh, she can’t be here because she’s been tasked with a job by the devil of Hell’s Kitchen, sorry for the inconvenience_ —”

“Talk a little louder, why don’t you,” says Karen, but she’s still laughing, so they’re probably fine. She hooks her arm through Darcy’s, giving her a shy sideways look like she thinks Darcy will pull away. Darcy squeezes her elbow, and pushes the door of Mug Shots open with her hip. “Give me the transcription job. Technically I’m the one that’s supposed to be doing it anyway, and besides, you need to slow down before you hurt yourself.”

“If I slow down I’ll have time to think. _Muy no bueno._ ”

“You idiot _,”_ Karen says. She smooshes Darcy’s arm. “You’re coming back to the apartment with me.”

“Did you not just hear all those things? I have many things. You cannot take me away from my things.”

“I swear to god I don’t know where the three of you would be without me,” says Karen. “You’d probably be dead.”

“Funny, I say the same thing about you guys.”

“I wonder if Foggy thinks it.”

“I know Matt does.”

Karen wrinkles her nose. “Yeah, well. He’s the one who’s decided to—” next to them, a businessman clears his throat, his eyes flicking between Karen’s legs and Darcy’s boobs “—you know, go to Chinatown all the time.”

“Is that what we’re calling it, going to Chinatown?”

“I feel like it’s a very—”

Karen stiffens. For a second, Darcy thinks that she’s seen someone, seen something, but then she pulls free of Darcy’s arm, and turns to the businessman waiting beside them on the corner. “You touch me again, I put your hand in a vice.”

“What are you talking about?” says the businessman, but there’s a grin twitching around the edges of his mouth that reminds her of Rich Goodman. “You sure you didn’t imagine it, sweetheart?”

“I’m talking about you. Touching me. Without my permission. On a street corner.” The words fly at him like bullets. “You’re never gonna do it again, because the next time I see you, I don’t care who you are or what you do, I will _break_ you. I will rip you apart so thoroughly that the police will never find your body, because they’ll think it’s hamburger.”

The guy laughs, as if it’s a joke. Then he actually looks Karen in the face, and goes a bit white around the mouth. “You can’t touch me.”

“Try me,” says Karen, and her voice is so low and venomous that the guy actually takes a step back. “I’m gonna be watching you, asshole. You touch a woman without her permission again, you disrespect _anyone_ like that again, I’ll ruin you. I’ll rip you apart. I have had a _very shitty_ few days, and I am fucking _done_ with people like you.”

The businessman looks at Darcy, as if to say, _Jesus, get a load of this crazy bitch._ Darcy hooks her arm through Karen’s again, pressing into her, and says, “You go, babe. I got your flower.”

“Fucking pair of PMSing bitches,” says the businessman, but he stalks away from them without further incident. He also moves at a fast enough clip that she thinks he might have actually heard them, though she doubts he’ll stop groping anytime soon. Darcy nearly throws a shoe at the back of his head.

“Anyway,” says Karen, as if she hadn’t just turned _complete and total badass_. “I feel like Chinatown’s a good metaphor for it. Considering.”

“It’d probably be less problematic if we pick something else, you know, political correctness-wise, but until we come up with something better, yeah, going to Chinatown sounds awesome.” Darcy glances back over her shoulder, but the businessman is gone. “You okay, Kare?”

“No,” Karen says. “But that helped a little.” She slides her arm back into Darcy’s. “We’re going back to the apartment. And I’m going to teach you some of my grandmother’s recipes, because it’s the only thing I can think of that’ll keep you in place for more than twenty minutes at a time. Which we _both_ need, before you say a word, so shut up and let me bake you things.”

She can’t help snorting. “Wow, such a punishment. I get _baked goods_.”

“I said shut up, Lewis,” says Karen, and tugs her back towards the apartment.

Jen’s home, for once. When she catches sight of Darcy on the threshold, she drops Darla to the floor, steps forward, and catches Darcy up in a hug so tight that she actually, genuinely cannot breathe for a good thirty seconds or so. Darcy wraps her arms around Jen, hiding her face in her shoulder, and together they rock back and forth for a long, breathless moment before Jen pulls back. She brushes Darcy’s hair out of her face, glances over at Karen. “You’re here,” she says. “Does that mean it’s over?”

“No, not yet.” Darcy squeezes Jen’s hands. “But we’re getting close.”

“I saw that someone attacked the G-Goodmans,” says Jen, and if she’s put together Kate the Olympic level archer with the mysterious bowman who made the Goodmans crash into a lamppost and put Rich in the hospital, she doesn’t say anything. There’s a distinctly knowing tilt to her eyes, though, that makes Darcy think she’s put it together. “How’s Kate?”

“I don’t really know. I haven’t seen her much.”

“Well.” Jen strokes Darcy’s hair again. It feels like what a mother should do, this constant touching, this reassurance that someone’s still well. Darcy kind of wants to cry. _But I have a mighty will, and I will not cry in front of my cousin. No matter how nice she’s being._ “If you _do_ come across her, let her know that as a member of the DA’s office I would be morally obligated to report any sort of v-vigilantism to the appropriate parties. _If_ I hear about it.”

 _It’s not like she killed them_ , Darcy wants to say, but when she feels Karen bump into her (she’s taking off her heels one at a time, awkwardly balanced with one hand on Darcy’s shoulder) she doesn’t. “Righty-ho,” she says instead. “Hi-ho, it’s time for baked goods.”

“I think Elena was getting ready to work on lunch—” whatever squabbles Jen and Elena have been having about kitchen dominance seem to have been resolved, because Jen is the calmest Darcy’s ever seen her at the thought of having someone else in her own private domain “—so you might want to head her off at the pass if you’re planning on baking things.”

“I am fine,” says Elena, poking her head out of the living room. Her eyes crinkle at the corners when she sees Darcy. “Darcy, _buenos dias._ ”

“ _Buenos dias_ , Elena,” says Darcy, and kisses Elena on the cheek. “ _Espero que estas dos te estén tratando bien._ ”

“ _Mejor de lo que tu lo harías_ ,” Karen says. Elena laughs. Darcy feels her ears turn red, but she grins at them anyway, because she’s full of so much _love_ for these people, enough that she seems to be floating, and she can’t help it, okay? She hooks an arm around Karen’s neck, and kisses her cheek.

“ _Eres una mentirosa,_ ” she tells her. “ _Una sucia, malvada, buena para nada mentirosa. Enséñame a hornear.”_

Elena perks up at the idea of learning a new recipe (and that right there is probably where Jen and Elena bonded, because Jen _loves_ learning new things in the kitchen; Darcy does Tumblr to relax, but Jen cooks, and she’s actually decent at it when she has the time to try) and it’s settled that they’re _all_ going to watch Karen make chocolate babka. “My grandmother on my dad’s side was Jewish,” she says, as she pulls everything out of the cupboards. “I mean, my dad wasn’t, he was adopted and he kind of went born-again after a while. Broke Gran’s heart, but she still taught me a lot.”

“Including the casserole full of virgin purity?”

“Shut up, Darcy,” says Karen again, but she touches her lips to the top of Darcy’s head (less a kiss than a push with her jaw and mouth) before heading for the mixer. “Get the chocolate out.”

“ _Vas a hacer el chocolate fresco?_ ” Elena asks, curiously. “ _Si lo mezclas con la masa toma menos tiempo. Y el chocolate del supermercado siempre sabe a químicos._ ”

“ _Nunca lo he intentado con chocolate fresco antes._ ” Karen frets a little. “ _No estoy segura si se como hacerl_ o.”

“I know,” says Elena, and stands. “ _Muévete, puedo mostrarte_.”

 And yeah. Maybe it’s not the most valuable use of her time, and maybe it’s not the thing that will keep them safest, but being here, remembering that these people she’s been protecting are whole and alive and _living_ —that’s the best thing that could happen right now. So she takes it.

.

.

.

Darcy’s not sure if she’s overthinking things by putting her mask into her bag and slipping her taser on underneath her hoodie, but she’d rather go ready than not, and besides—the last time she’d met Matt somewhere in the middle of the night, she’d ended up assaulting someone. She’s pretty sure it’s better to be safe than sorry.

The directions Matt gives her makes her wonder exactly how much of New York City he has memorized. The alleys, the by-ways, the underpasses and the torn fences; she slips through and over and under and around, and thinks, _Matt does this blind._ He has the whole city in his head laid out like a living thing, and some part of her—most of her, really—is quietly terrified over it all. _Why would someone like him pick someone like me?_

Yeah, okay, it sounds terrible if she phrases like that. It’s more like—she knows she’s not unexceptional. She’s made of fury and fire and bad pop culture references, and sometimes that’s good. Sometimes she can help people. Sometimes she can even do something really, really powerful, and scare the shit out of herself. But most of the time it’s just, you know. She’s long since come to terms with the fact that she’s the sidekick and not the hero, and there’s nothing wrong with that. She’s broken in a way that can’t be fixed, and even if she tries her best to be the sort of person that’s good, good and kind and trustworthy and real, she’s never really going to achieve it. She fucks up more than she succeeds, and the parts of her that are shattered are going to stay that way, all molted glass and double-edged smiles. And yeah, she believes Matt when he says he loves her (which he hasn’t, really, not since Nobu, but since she hasn’t said it either, that doesn’t surprise her), but she’s just…genuinely unsure as to why.

It’s a horrible thought. She knows it’s a horrible thought. Even if she knows how horrible it is, right down to her marrow, it’s just a niggling doubt that won’t go away. She’d been right, when she’d told Karen that she’s a lot less decisive than she sounds. She’s just used to thinking faster than most people, going through the consequences faster. She hasn’t really thought about this—this _thing_ with Matt at all, hasn’t had the time. They haven’t had a chance to talk about it more than a few, sidelined conversations about spices, and she’s not sure if that should frighten her. But she loves him too much to be able to handle it, if it turns out to be just—endorphins, or friendship, or whatever else it could be that Matt’s stupid Catholic streak would trick him into thinking of as something _more._

_You light up the dark places and make them feel like home. That’s why._

She’s not sure if that’s enough.

The address Matt had given her is that of a brownstone near Battery Park, one of those rare examples of garaged houses in the city. Matt’s lurking in the shadows between two of the nearby brownstones, and he gestures at her as she comes to a stop on the opposite side of the street, her hoodie pulled up over her hair. Her bag (a cheap black backpack that she’d snatched up for three dollars at a yard sale) bounces against her side, pinching at a bruise on her hip. She stops a few feet away. “Hey.”

“Hey,” says Matt, and there’s something genuine in his voice, something like his sunshine smile, and it’s so warm and real and brilliant that it hurts. He shouldn’t be able to _do_ that, but he does without even realizing it. Darcy hooks her hands into her jeans pockets, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, and he cocks his head at her. “What?”

“Nothing.” The corners of her mouth lift. “Just…hi.”

He’s never been just Matt in the devil costume before, but now he is. He reaches out with one hand, hooks two fingers into one of her belt loops, and pulls her into the dark. _I love you_ , she thinks, and when he bends down to kiss her she goes up on tiptoe and meets him, feathering her nails through the fine hair at the back of his neck. She’s never actually taken it seriously, the idea that you can love someone _this much_. It almost frightens her, the thought of it. She can’t shake the idea that she’s not worthy of feeling this much, of having the chance to _care_ this much about someone. Like she’s overflowing with it. She smiles into his mouth, wide enough that he can’t quite kiss her anymore. Still, he clings close enough that she can feel his jaw moving as he says, “What’s that for?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I like you.”

“Maybe?”

“Maybe.” She touches her mouth to his lower lip. “What are we doing out here?”

She can feel it when he shifts from Matt to the devil. Her hands are pressed to his chest, and she _feels_ it, not in the beat of his heart or the rhythm of his lungs or anything like that, but in how he holds himself, how he stands. He shifts, and she loves this part of him, too, the shadows that dance beneath the surface. Maybe that’s what made him hers. Maybe he’s been catching hints of her own shadows for years, the same way she’s caught hints of his, and she’s just never noticed. “There’s a man here I want you to talk to,” he says. “He works for Fisk.”

“I mean, I have my mask, but I don’t know if I can—you actually want me to talk to him?”

“Not _talk_ to him, just—” He nudges his nose against her cheekbone, absently. She’s pretty sure he doesn’t know he’s doing it. “He’s the one who made Fisk’s body armor. He’s making something for me, and I thought, if you were going to keep doing this, he ought to make something for you, too. It’ll block knives and take most of the hit from a bullet, good stuff, light, easy to move in. Easy to fight in,” he adds, and Darcy slides her fingers under the waistband of his pants, so that her fingertips are just barely brushing his hip. She hooks her hand in and holds him there, because she just needs to touch him, right now. She’s addicted. “If you want him to make you something, that is.”

She doesn’t say anything for a long time. Darcy presses her cheek to his chest, listening to the beat of his heart. He hasn’t let go of her yet, and there’s a miracle in that, that the devil, who’s so carefully, violently explicit in how he touches people, hasn’t pushed her away. She lets her eyes drift closed. “Would you be upset if I said I wanted one?”

“It means you would be as safe as you could be without me being there,” Matt says. “So no. I wouldn’t be upset.”

She rests her hand against the bandage on his belly. “When will your suit be ready?”

“He says a few more days. Thursday at the latest. If we add yours on, maybe Friday, I don’t know.” His gloves feel strange against the small of her back, rough, thick fabric with a plastic coating. It scrapes. “But that’s only if you want it.”

“I want it.” The words swell in her throat. “I think—I think I want it. Even if I don’t use it that often, or—I don’t know. I want it.”

He sighs. He doesn’t say anything else, just curves into her, and Darcy sets her cheek to his and goes up on her tiptoes so she can press the whole of herself against him, feel the way he bends and cracks. Matt hugs her close for a moment, and then he lets her go, because there’s a car coming, and it would be the exact opposite of what they need right now, for the devil of Hell’s Kitchen to be photographed with his arms around a girl with long dark hair and glasses and a mouth painted red. She draws back, and goes through her bag, collecting her stolen gloves. “What’s he like?” she says, as she pulls them on (Matt has to help with getting the first one over her splinted fingers, and he gives her a very Matt Murdock-ish expression when his fingers pass over her bandage and he realizes how she’s fucked up her hand, again). (She’d only popped one stitch, but he can probably smell where she fixed it back up. And she _never_ wants to stitch herself back up again.) “This guy.”

Matt waits until she’s folded her glasses away into her bag, slipped in her contacts (she’s had years of practice putting them in blind, but she still has to blink for a minute or two before they end up properly inserted) and hooked the mask over her head before he says, “He’s very lost.”

“Lost like how? Lost like—morally? Cosmically? Sexually?”

“Mentally.” He folds the Velcro on over the back of her wrist. “Something’s—I looked into him a little bit. He’s a veteran. Spent six months in the psychiatric hospital when he came back from Afghanistan. He’s not—I don’t think he’s entirely there, anymore. There are moments where he’s more lucid, thinks more like an adult, but for now he’s just…” He seems to be searching for the right word. “Fisk found him through his work online. He used to sell personally tailored uniforms to his buddies in the armed forces, the ones who kept in contact with him after they realized how far he’s regressed, mentally, anyway. But now he only makes things for Fisk.”

“Does he know who Fisk is?”

“He knows that Fisk is threatening his next-door neighbor to make sure he does his best work,” says Matt, and it falls into her all over again, the burning, seething, writhing hate. _Fisk has to die._ “Her name’s Betsy. I think she’s a night nurse. She keeps an eye on him sometimes, helps him with paperwork. She’s…She’s kind.”

“It’s good that he has someone.” She tugs her hair around so that it falls down her back, instead of over her shoulders. “So he’s—basically what you’re saying is that he’s mentally handicapped?”

“In a lot of ways, that’s the closest approximation. You’ll see what I mean.” He steps back from her, and Darcy stows her bag behind the nearby dumpster. “You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

The garage door is locked up tight when Matt knocks (three times quick, two slow, and three times quick again). Inside she can hear the buzz of a sewing machine, the quick rattling hum of a steamer. _Is he boiling the cloth?_ If he’s using some kind of leather-plastic blend, it might make it tougher, but how anyone without an industrial-grade factory could do something like that is beyond her. Matt knocks again, in the same sequence, and she hears a chair scrape. “Coming,” says a voice. It’s deeper than she’d expected. “Coming, I’m coming.”

Three clicks (three separate locks? Jesus) and then the garage door clatters up into the ceiling. The man beyond is tall, but he stands as if he’s much smaller, his shoulders a little hunched and his eyes red from peering at small machine parts, small needles. He relaxes at the sight of Matt, and then he notices her there, standing behind and just to the side. He actually gives a little cry, and leaps back, seizing the nearest thing that comes to hand—a socket wrench. “ _She’s not supposed to be here,_ ” he says, and it sounds as if his heart is broken. “You _brought_ someone here. You’re not supposed to—she’s not supposed to be here, they’ll hurt—”

“Melvin,” says Matt in a low, soothing voice. It’s Matt speaking, not the devil. Darcy takes the hint, and pulls her hands from her pockets, holding them away from herself, showing how weaponless and vulnerable she is. (The taser underneath her sweater burns.) “Melvin, it’s all right. This is a friend of mine. She’s not going to tell anyone about you, or about Betsy. Can you put the wrench down?”

“Mr. Fisk said nobody else is supposed to come in here.” The man frets with his wrench. In his other hand there’s a piece of cloth a yard long, a dark, gleaming black. “And I let you in because you were nice to me and you said you’d be able to help Betsy, but you’re not—you’re not supposed to be bringing other people in here.”

“I know.” Matt raises his hands, as if Melvin has a gun pointed at him. “But she’s my friend. She wants to help with Betsy, too. And I think you’ll like her, Melvin. She’s a nice person.”

Melvin wavers. He actually physically rocks from one side to the other, as if he’s weighing the import of his decision on either side of himself. He looks at Darcy and then away again, like he’s frightened of her. “She’s not going to tell Mr. Fisk?”

“Fisk tried to hurt her very badly,” says Matt. “She’s helping me get rid of him, Melvin. I promise you, you can trust her.”

He hesitates. She can see Melvin’s eyes flicker, and for an instant he looks older. But only for an instant. “You want me to make a special suit for her, too.”

“Only if you want to, Melvin. But yes, I would like that. Very much.”

Melvin pinches the bridge of his nose, and continues to rock. The sheet of cloth dangling from his hand rocks with him, almost like a veil. He tips his head to the side. “Is she like your Betsy?”

Matt doesn’t seem to know what to say to this. He clears his throat. “Yes, Melvin,” he says, in a quiet voice. “Yes. She’s like my Betsy. She helps me be good.”

Her eyes begin to sting. Melvin studies Matt for a long time. Then he nods. “Okay. I’ll meet her, your friend. And—and I want to make a special suit for her, too. If she helps you be good, she needs a suit like yours. To make sure that she doesn’t get hurt.”

 _I’m not crying._ Darcy blinks furiously, trying to clear her face, as Matt turns and gestures at her. “You can come in,” he says, and as if it’s an afterthought, Melvin deposits his wrench on the table. “Melvin’s not going to do anything.”

“I’ll be good,” says Melvin. “I promise.”

Darcy flexes her hands inside her gloves. Then, slowly, she creeps into the garage, wishing she’d thought to bring her wig along with her. She’s not certain she likes having this man know what color her hair is, how long it is, anything identifiable about her. She clears her throat. “Hello,” she says. “You can call me Lilith, if you want.”

“I’m Melvin,” says Melvin. “Well, my full name is Melvin Anthony Potter, but you can call me Melvin. Betsy calls me Mel.” He cocks his head, frowning at her. “You’re wearing a mask.”

“Yes.” Darcy taps her fingertip against the side of the mask. “Do you want to touch it?”

“It’s made of plastic,” he says, without reaching out. “If it breaks it could hurt you. Why do you wear something like that? You could wear a ski-mask, like Mike.”

Mike again. She wonders where he’d even picked up that name. “I know it’s not the best, but I don’t plan on letting people close enough to me for it to hurt.” She licks her lips. “Besides, it helps me protect the people I care about.”

Melvin’s eyebrows wrinkle. “Is it a special mask?”

“No, but it keeps Fisk from knowing who I am. If he knows who I am, he can hurt the people I love.” She creeps a little closer. “It’s the same reason why he wears the mask. The devil. Mike, I mean.”

Melvin’s eyes dart to Matt, and then back to her. “So you can keep people safe.”

“Yes. So I can keep people safe.”   

He rocks onto the balls of his feet. “He said he needed a special mask that covered his eyes, because he doesn’t use them. But you can see. I can tell because you’re watching me.” He tips his head. “Your eyes are green.”

Darcy blinks. “Yes, they are. I’m surprised you see that in the dark.”

“I have good eyesight,” says Melvin proudly. He pulls the garage door back down again, and tugs on a string. A single light bulb flickers to life between the beams. “Your uniform is nearly done. I worked on it all night. It should be ready by tomorrow.”

Matt folds his hands up. “If you make a suit for my friend, how long will it take you?”

Melvin gives Darcy another top-to-toe glance, as if he’s calculating. “Three days.”

“I don’t want you to get in trouble with Fisk. If he has something he wants you to do—”

“I finished repairing his suits already. I tell him it takes longer than it does, so he doesn’t come around as often.” Melvin’s eyes flicker. “He frightens Betsy. If I can keep him away longer, then I will.”

Matt still shifts a little, back and forth, vibrating with an energy that she hasn’t seen in days. “You’re certain it will only take that long?”

“Three days,” he says again. Melvin shuffles closer to Darcy, and when he reaches out to touch her hair, she doesn’t flinch. He does it the way a curious elementary schooler would, his fingers flicking towards her and away again, and he touches the mask, too, tracing the lines of color like he’s trying to feel out the differences. Darcy just watches him. There’s a scar under his jaw, twisted and knotted like an old shoelace. It’s maybe the thickness of her pinky fingernail. Then Melvin meets her eyes, warily. “Well, three days if you want something nice.”

There’s something hard and ropey pressing into her throat, like barbed wire. “Yes, Melvin. I think—I think I’d like something nice very much.”

Melvin gives her a shy smile, and some part of her breaks, then. She heaves a breath that has Matt shifting like he’s seen an enemy, and she reaches out to press her hand to the small of his back. _I’m okay. Just crying._ Melvin looks as though someone’s hit him, his eyes darting between Lilith and Mike and back again. “I’m okay,” she says, her voice cracking. “It’s okay, Melvin. You didn’t do anything. I’m just—I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“If you’re tired, you should sleep,” Melvin says. “I had a sergeant who could sleep standing up. You should try that. Because I have to measure you, and I can’t do that as good if you’re lying down.”

“I’ll sleep when I get home.” Darcy pins her good hand between her ribs and her arm to pull off the glove, and offers him her hand. Melvin touches his fingertips to the center of her palm, and then pulls away again, as if the idea of a handshake is beyond him. “Where do you want me, Melvin?”

“The stool’s here,” says Melvin, and goes to drag something out from underneath the worktable.

They choose black, because it’s the fabric that Melvin has the most of, and because Darcy thinks that if she’s going to be named after the mother of monsters, she might as well go with the deepest ebony she can find. She wishes it could be looser, wishes it could hide more of her (she knows that the imperfections of her body don’t matter, knows that nobody will care, but she still doesn’t like showing off the way she has a little bit of a belly, or how her thighs move when she walks) but there’s the fact that she’s going to need to be able to run and punch and kick without fabric getting in the way, so she grits her teeth and deals with it. The design covers almost every inch of her skin—it has a turtleneck, and together, the two pieces (shirt and pants) cover her from wrists to ankles. She’s not sure she believes Melvin when he tells her that it’s fairly easy to get in and out of. It also looks like it’ll chafe. “No,” Melvin says, when she voices this concern (she’s had enough with chafing; thanks, leather pants). “I line it. It’s special.”

He measures every part of her—her inseam, the length of her feet, her ribcage (when her lungs are full), her ribcage again (when her lungs are empty), the flare of her hips, the breadth of her shoulders, the circumference of her arms, her head, her legs, her wrists, her neck. She’ll need to get it taken in when she starts training more, but for now it’s something that can cover her, keep her safe. He asks if she wants to keep this mask or switch it out for something else, and she’s honestly not sure about that, so she shrugs a little. The whole time, Matt simply listens, perched in the corner with her red sweatshirt draped over his lap, head cocked. She’s not sure if he’s listening to them, or to the world, but he’s still listening. 

It takes about an hour before both Darcy and Melvin are both satisfied with the design of Lilith. “Lamia, succubus, queen,” Melvin tells her, looking pleased with himself. “I remember, from school. I wrote my thesis on her. I have books, upstairs. _Her house sinks down to death, and her course leads to the shades. All who go to her cannot return, and find again the paths of life._ ”

“That’s from Proverbs,” says Darcy, blinking. Jen reads through the Torah every year, the way she’s supposed to, making notes. She knows Darcy knows enough about the women in Judeo-Christian traditions that she sometimes throw lines at her, stuff about Esther and Rebecca and Sarah and Rachel. She doesn’t talk about Lilith much, but Darcy remembers the lines from some of the papers she’d written in her religion classes, back when she’d had time for anything but legality. She peers closer at Melvin. “You wrote your thesis on Lilith?”

“In school,” says Melvin. “I went to school. Before—before the nightmares, I went to school. Hebrew Union College. Jewish Institute of Religion. Los Angeles. Class of 2007. Then I enlisted. Student loans. Easier to have the Army pay, Melvin. You’ll do good there.” He fades, a little. He’s ghosting. She wonders if he’s having a flashback. Melvin puts his fabric scissors down. “ _Samael is called the Slant Serpent, and Lilith is called the Torturous Serpent._ _May she be extirpated quickly in our days, Amen._ ”

“Melvin.” Darcy steps down from the stool. Melvin’s eyes catch on her nail polish, painted fresh by Karen while they’d been waiting for the babka to cook, Mesmerized Blue. “Melvin, hey. Look at me.”

“Your eyes are green,” he tells her again. “Your eyes are green like Sooraya’s.”

“Who’s Sooraya?”

“Sooraya. Sooraya’s kind. Betsy’s kind. They’re nicer to me than they should be.” He sinks closer to the floor, into a crouch, as if he’s hiding from something. “ _The wild cat shall meet with the jackals, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow, yea, Lilith shall repose there and find her a place of rest._ They shot at her and Sooraya turned to dust and now there’s nothing left, I don’t—”

The rest of it falls into a long, lilting song that sounds like it’s in Arabic or Farsi or Hebrew, or some scattered mix of the three. Matt’s halfway out of his chair, unsure. Darcy rests her hand between Melvin’s shoulder blades, and swipes her thumb back and forth until he quiets. It happens sooner than she expects, but not very quickly at all, and when Melvin finally lifts his face from his hands again, his eyes are fuzzy.

“Lilith,” he says again, and she nods.

“Yeah, Melvin. Lilith.”

“Lilith and Mike.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.” Melvin shakes his head once. “Not supposed to do that. Not supposed to talk about Sooraya. Not supposed to think about it. Doesn’t help. Doctor said it was a dream. Said people can’t turn to dust. He said I need to take the pills. Mr. Fisk says I need to take the pills. But the pills make me—they make me do bad work, I can’t do good work when I take them. I miss stitches. Betsy says the doctor’s fucking wrong. But he’s a doctor. Not supposed to be wrong.”

Sounds more like a lazy diagnosis to her. Darcy pets him for a minute or two longer. Too many patients with too many problems. Slap a diagnosis on it, move them along. Who cares if it’s right, or if the drugs actually help? “And what do you think, Melvin?”

“I think the sleeves should have holes,” he says. “For your thumbs. Keeps them from riding up, showing your skin. And then gloves, because you can’t leave prints. Boots, tall ones, with a heel, but thick enough you can run. Change your height.” He lifts a strand of her hair again. “Yours?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Dark. Lilith’s supposed to be dark.” Actually, she’s fairly sure that Lilith’s supposed to be a redhead, but she doesn’t want to contradict him, in case he goes back into flashback-mode. He flicks his hands at her, and stands. Darcy heaves herself to her feet. In the corner, Matt slips out of his chair, her sweatshirt held in both his hands. “Go. Need to work. Working keeps me clear.”  

“Are you okay if we leave you, Melvin?”

“Fine.” He flicks his hands again. “Go. Can’t work with people here. Distracting. Too many noises. Can’t keep an eye on the perimeter. Come back in three days. It’ll be done by then. Both,” he adds to Matt, who has such an expression on his face that she wonders if he can even hear a word they’re saying. “Finished with both. Three days.”

“Three days,” Matt repeats, and before she can say anything else, he touches a hand to the small of her back and they leave the garage. Melvin locks it back up behind them, padlock after padlock after padlock. The buzz of the sewing machine follows them for three blocks, until she realizes it’s just the way her ears are ringing. They take the alley between two brownstones, clamber up a fire escape onto a roof, and finally stop within sight of Battery Park itself, tired swingsets and dying grass.

Darcy sits down hard as far away as she can get from the ledge. Heights are not good for her. She’s not sure if it’s because she’s short, and she’s not used to seeing things from this sort of angle, or if it’s because she has completely natural human instincts that have ratcheted up to a thousand times stronger because _um heights are evil_ , but either way, she’s not a fan of this rooftop travel.

“I didn’t know he’d react that strongly,” says Matt. He tugs off his gloves, pulling at the hems. “Sorry. Should have been paying more attention.”

“You couldn’t have known he’d react like that to my eyes, Matt.” She pushes her mask up off her face, rubs at her temples. “I mean, Jesus. And he’s sick, anything could send him into a flashback if his PTSD that’s bad. If that’s even all it is.”

“You think there’s something else to it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know enough about post-traumatic stress disorder to tell you if that sort of regression is normal or not. And even if it’s not, he needs a better coping mechanism than locking himself in his garage and making body armor for vigilantes.” She pulls her hair back out of her face. “I wonder what hospital he’s with.”

“Darcy.”

“What?”

“You can’t save everyone.”

“Maybe not. But maybe—maybe once this is done, I can talk to his doctor. See what happened.” She takes her sweatshirt back from him, and pulls it on over her head, leaving the hood up to cover her hair. Matt’s standing close enough that when she reaches out, he only needs to drop his hand from his side to catch hers. “Where were you planning on going?”

“I found one of the Triad distribution centers. Ben says the leader’s a woman. Thought I’d have a talk with her.” He pulls her to her feet. “It’s not that far from Elena’s tenement. Won’t take me long to get there if I move quickly.”

“And I’m assuming you don’t want me along.”

He doesn’t say anything. He just dips his face towards hers.

“Are we going to argue about this every time?” she says. “Or every time until I get my special suit?”

“I counted six men with guns when I scouted it out this afternoon, and that was outside. There were more inside. Doing something like this isn’t the same as talking to Lynch, and until I know you can defend yourself, I don’t want you to be at risk. Not yet. Darcy, please.”

“I’m already at risk,” she says, but she closes her eyes. She does get it, truly. She has a taser. One person, two, yeah, that she can probably deal with. She _has_ dealt with it. But that’s not the same as going into a room full of people at least a foot taller and probably fifty pounds heavier than her that are also armed with guns and knives and even mutations for all she knows. And as much as she wants to go in after him, to make sure he has someone to watch his back, she _will not_ be the one that gets him stabbed in it. “We’re starting on those lessons tomorrow, Matt.”

“Your wrist is still broken.”

“And your guts are still hanging out of you, but if you can do hardcore parkour, then I can throw a few punches. I’ll just have to deal with being uneven for a while.” She pushes at his shoulder, and Matt rocks back and forth, keeping his feet. “I’m sick of being on the sidelines. And if you won’t teach me, then I’ll look up kickboxing videos on YouTube or something, so don’t push me on this.” She considers. “Maybe we should get Karen to join in too. And Kate, once she stops being—you know. I don’t know if Foggy would want to, too, but—but we all need to know how to protect ourselves. And aside from Kate, none of us can really afford a teacher.”

His mouth contorts, weirdly, like it can’t decide which direction to quirk. “Foggy will probably say no.”

“But Karen and Kate would say yes.”

He sighs. “We’ll talk about it.”

“But I start tomorrow.”

“We can start tomorrow, yes.” Somewhere close by, a siren starts up. Matt lifts his head, turning his nose to the breeze. She wonders what he’s smelling. Then he looks back down at her. “How’s Karen?”

“She’s…she’s not okay. But she’s living.” Darcy purses her lips. “How much did you pick up from her, when you caught up with her?”

He stills, as if he’s caught in a spotlight. Then, slowly, he relaxes. “The river,” he says. “Drugs in her blood, sedatives. She moved as if they were still affecting her, still in her system. Blood. Bruises. Gunpowder. Metal. A man’s cologne. I’ve smelled it before, but I don’t remember where. Her heartbeat was too fast. There were tears on her cheeks. Cigarette smoke in her hair. She wrung her hands like she was trying to tear them off.”

And there’s the story in scent and sound, the aftermath tattooed into the air like invisible ink. Matt doesn’t ask, and Darcy doesn’t say anything, but she knows he’s guessed. _He’s dead,_ Karen had said on the phone. _Metal and gunpowder and blood. A man’s cologne._ Yeah, Matt’s guessed. Matt’s guessed, and hasn’t said anything. She wonders if Karen’s put it together yet, everything Matt would be able to pick up from the evidence she hadn’t had a chance to wash away.

“Okay.” She licks her lips. “I’m—we’ll make sure she’ll be okay. She has to be okay.” Because if Foggy’s the heart of the firm, Karen’s the spine, the central nervous system, the one that links them all, keeps them upright, keeps them working and feeling and real. They can’t lose Karen. Not now, not ever. “We’ll make her be okay.”

Matt nudges his chin into her scalp, and stands close to her for a moment. “You were right,” he says. “She’s—she’s stronger than I thought she was.”

“I’m glad that you realize that. We’re a team. All four of us.” She thinks of Kate. “Five of us. We can’t work without every part.”

“This,” Matt says, “is not exactly what I had in mind when I decided to start wearing a mask.”

“I think we’re all the devil, now,” she says. “You’re more him than any of us, but—but we all have a part of it inside of us. Even Foggy, though maybe—maybe he has the least of it. But we’re all the devil in some way. And we need every part of each other in order to handle it without falling apart.” She presses her hands to his jaw. “Which is why you need to _be safe,_ you asshole. You come back alive. You come _back_ to us. You hear me? You need to come back, because we need you.” Darcy scrapes her fingernails over his cheek, not enough to scratch, but enough to leave a mark. “I need you to come back.”

His mask flutters a little when he blinks. Matt draws her to him. She can taste the tang of sweat on his upper lip, something metallic when the split from Karen’s punch cracks open again. Darcy digs her nails into the back of his neck, holding him still, anchoring him there, and thinks, _You make me better, too_. She’s whole and hale and human on her own, but something about Matt makes her feel like she can do more. Like she can be more than she is, more than the surging anger beneath her skin. Like she ought to try. It’s less a kiss than a touch of open mouths, and Darcy holds on until she can’t any longer, until she has to pull away. There’s a gloved hand on the small of her back and another against the feathered dagger on the back of her neck, and Matt leans forward until he knocks his forehead to hers. She can feel him trying to catch his breath.

“I will,” he says. “Tonight, and tomorrow, and the next night. As long as you want me to, I’ll come back.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“I can promise that they’ll have to rip me apart to keep me from trying,” he says, and if the image makes her hiccup and her eyes burn, she’s not going to admit it to anyone. Darcy pushes her thumb into the soft spot behind his ear.

“I’d prefer you come back whole, though.”

“Then I’ll come back whole.” He sets his mouth to her cheekbone. “But I’ll come back to you.”

“You are such a goober.” She sets her nose to the hollow of his throat. “When the hell did you get this sappy on me?”

He laughs, silent. “Some people call this _smooth_.”

“It’s sap. Sticky, sticky sap.” But it’s making her smile anyway, because maybe she’s worth it, after all. She kisses his cheek. “Go. I can get home on my own. I’ll wait up for you.”

He stops and starts again, like a car turning over. “Home,” he says, quietly, and she realizes the same moment he does that she’s not talking about her and Jen’s apartment. She’s talking about his. “Call me when you get there. Let the phone ring twice and then hang up. I’ll keep it on vibrate so you don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll worry anyway,” she says, something giddy spreading through to the tips of her fingers. “But yeah. I’ll—I guess I’ll see you at home.”

Matt catches her hand, presses it to his heart for a moment. She wonders if she’s imagining the way it’s beating in time with hers. Then he lets go, and disappears into the dark. She thinks she catches a flash of him leaping from this roof to the next, but the street lamps down below have gone out, and there’s only a flicker of movement to the east. In the next instant, it’s gone, and she feels completely, totally alone.

“Home,” Darcy says again, but it still doesn’t taste wrong. Stick had already said she was all over everything. Perhaps it’s her place, after all.

She takes a cab back, because even if she has hospital bills, she’s not walking alone at night from Battery Park to Hell’s Kitchen. It’s just not happening, especially with the blisters she _still has_ from the night she scared the piss out of Lynch. (Walking out here, even after the initial cab ride, was bad enough.) She still has Matt’s spare key on the ring next to Claire’s, one he’d pressed on her the first night they’d both been conscious enough to speak after Nobu. The billboard is shining bright patches of pink and green through the windows onto the wood floor, and someone (she has a feeling it was Foggy) has dragged all the broken plastic and shattered planks out of the apartment to dump into the alley. Darcy pushes her hood back, and shuts the door behind her with her foot, snapping the padlock home. It smells like coffee and Thai food and the cedar wood that Matt keeps in the trunk with his father’s things, and she rests her forehead against the grain of the door, just for a moment.

“Hell of a way to move in, Lewis,” she says.

“I wonder,” says a voice. Darcy drops her keys. “How long does it take to realize you’ve made a mistake about a person? A few hours? A few weeks? I think, for some people, it takes years. But it always comes back to that first—that first _shiver_ of doubt. _Where did I go wrong?_ ”

Her heart squeezes, clenches. She can’t breathe. _No._ It can’t be true. This isn’t reality. This is—this is something else entirely, hell or madness or a universe different from her own, but it’s not real. It can’t be real.

She hears the chair creak, and her mind goes blank.

“The thing about people is that we’re naturally inclined to trust,” he says. “From infancy, we’re told that those around us, those closest to us—those people matter. That they are worthy of our respect. As we grow, so do the numbers. We don’t just trust our parents, our siblings, but our teachers. Our classmates. We are told that trust is another form of respect, and that we are to dispense it amongst our neighbors, our bus drivers, our newscasters. And when they betray that trust we place in them, the trust that society convinces us is right, we are wounded beyond repair. Because we are told to believe that trust is a two-way street. But it’s not, is it, Miss Lewis? I think, slowly, you have begun to discover the truth of it. Trust isn’t a two-way street. Trust is a farce. Trust is a tool used by the rich and the powerful, to convince the masses that they were right. There is only one thing in the world that should be trusted, and that is that everyone, no matter who they are—your father, your doctor, your—your president: someday, they will betray you. It’s not a matter of hows, or intentions. It’s of when. The whys, the wheres, those are inconsequential. The betrayal will come, and all you can do is prepare for it.”

She has to turn around. She can’t. She can barely even breathe. Darcy closes her eyes, presses her thumb hard into her broken hand. It breaks through the numbness, shatters it. She turns, and Wilson Fisk is sitting in the armchair, watching her.

“Where you go wrong isn’t in associating with people,” he says. “It’s with ever trusting them in the first place.” He waves a hand. “Sit down, Miss Lewis. I believe we have much to discuss.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Chángjiāng hòulàng tuī qiánlàng_ means "The waves of the Chanjiang drive more waves ahead" or something roughly approximating that. The English equivalent is "the energy of the young inspires the old."
> 
> Spanish translations: 
> 
> Elena: "Darcy, _good afternoon._ "  
> Darcy: " _Good afternoon, Elena. I hope these two have been nice to you._  
>  Karen: " _Nicer than you would have been._ "  
> Darcy: “ _You’re a liar. A dirty, filthy, no-good liar. Teach me baked goods.”_
> 
> Elena: “ _Are you going to make the chocolate fresh? If you’re mixing it into the batter then it would take less time. And chocolate from the grocery store always tastes like chemicals._ ”  
> Karen: “ _I’ve never tried it with fresh chocolate before. I’m not sure I know how to make it._ ”  
> Elena: “I know. _Move over, I can show you._ ”
> 
> Sooraya is one of the X-Men, a devout Sunni Afghani who literally turns herself to dust. She can spread herself out so thin that even extremely talented psychics like Professor X and Jean Grey can barely sense her presence, and retain her mind. If she moves in her dust form, she looks like a dust devil or a moving sandstorm. She's badass. (She's also not dead, but Melvin isn't well, and plus, seeing someone literally turn themselves to dust when a soldier shoots at them? Especially if you don't know they're a mutant? Um, yeah, trauma. Especially because Sooraya is collected by the X-Men and placed at the Mumbai X-Men base after this incident, in my canon.)
> 
> NEWS! An absolutely FABULOUS person (I'm looking at you, theendisfaraway) made a TPoW Darecy mix on 8tracks! I'm crying. I listened to it all through work today and was obnoxiously teary. Link is here: http://8tracks.com/amaregg01/the-albatross-around-your-neck
> 
> Also! I will have a Karen oneshot up tomorrow as a present for malfaou, whose birthday is tomorrow. HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY, DARLIN'!
> 
> (Query: do you guys have any suggested tags for TPoW that aren't already up? Witty ones are appreciated.)


	20. Playing Ostrich

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You might notice that TPoW is now a series! There's only one other fic up, and it's tiny, but I liked it. (Pssst it's Karen punching Matt in the face you should check it out.)
> 
> Oh my god, you guys, I'm so sorry these past few chapters have been so massive. Basically I've given up trying to keep to the 8k limit because cleARLY there are too many things happening to have that stick around. But FINALLY we are on the last episode. Two chapters (which will hopefully each be shorter) and an epilogue to go!
> 
> Chapter title comes from the 1992 speech of Thurgood Marshall (yes, that guy Matt quotes a lot), excerpted here:
> 
>  
> 
> _We cannot play ostrich. Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work. In the chill climate in which we live, we must go against the prevailing wind. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand, waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away. We must dissent from a government that has left its young without jobs, education or hope. We must dissent from the poverty of vision and the absence of moral leadership. We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better._
> 
>  
> 
> TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR: strangulation, attempted murder, headshots, burns, allusions to knife wounds, post-traumatic shock, blood, fingernail scratches, many sadfaces, lots of tears, and Jurisprudential Philosophy.

“Get out.”

She doesn’t know how she’s speaking, right now. She doesn’t know if she even is, or if she’s just thinking it, loudly enough that it vibrates inside her chest with the force of it. _Get out._ It’s a voice she’s never heard before, rage and terror and fury. She’s speaking to her mother and Eli’s father and the aliens that attacked her city and Rich Goodman and James Wesley and Fisk, all at once. She _snarls_ it. “ _Get out._ ”

“And miss my last chance to speak with you?” He shakes his head. “You never answered my question, when Nobu died. Besides, there are a variety of things we have to go over. It seems you’ve been busy of late, Miss Lewis.”

“Get out of this apartment,” says Darcy. “Or I will _make_ you.”

He stands. She’d forgotten until right now, this exact nanosecond, how absolutely _huge_ he is. It feels like he takes up half the room, even without the sheer presence of him. He’s at least a head taller and easily a hundred pounds heavier than her, half again her width, and she’s always tried to avoid being frightened of people purely based off of how they look, but Wilson Fisk scares her. If he wanted to, he could probably crush her skull between his massive palms.

“I would like very much to see you try,” he says. “Please sit.”

She has her taser on her hip, covered by her sweatshirt. She’s not sure it’s going to do anything against someone like Fisk. He has body armor, and she has—she has nothing but a glorified spark plug.

Darcy crosses the floor, and sits on the very edge of the couch.

Fisk settles in the chair again. He curls his hands around the arms of it, fidgeting with the cuffs of his dress shirt. She hears Foggy, for a moment. _Fisk, poor fat kid with family problems! Fisk, abandoned by his father! Fisk, humanitarian!_ She can’t imagine Fisk ever being the one bullied. She sees him as the bully, as the intimidator. She can’t see him as the victim. Not now. “How did you get in here?”

 _Matt,_ she thinks. Her phone is in her back pocket and too far away. If she doesn’t call him, will he realize something’s wrong? Will he come after her? _But the warehouse is near Elena’s tenement and that’s fifteen minutes away._ Whatever Fisk has planned, she knows for sure that it won’t take that long. Her brain glances against and away the idea of what Fisk wants from her, what he’s going to do. _Kill her?_ Probably. She licks her lips. Fisk in Matt’s apartment. _Does he know_? Could he have worked it out? Is that why he’s here, for the devil, for Lilith if he knows about her, for all of it, for the pair of them?

“The same way I get in anywhere. I asked nicely.” He has the oddest dip and sway to his voice. She can’t predict how he’ll say any one word, just that he’ll say it differently than anyone else would. “Not illegally, if that’s what you’re asking. I informed the landlady that I was a client of the firm, and that Mr.—Murdock, correct?—that Mr. Murdock had requested I wait here for him. So far as I know, he’s had no reason to disbelieve me.”

 _Oh, god._ It’s exactly the sort of story that Mrs. Hseng would fall for. “You didn’t hurt her?”

“I prefer not to batter defenseless old women if I can help it.”

The viper inside her writhes. “Tell that to Elena Cardenas. You’re the one who tried to have her killed.”

Fisk seems to go flat, for a moment. His mouth tightens. He says, “It would have been an unfortunate circumstance, if that had indeed come to pass. Fortunately, it proved to be unnecessary.”

“You hired a junkie to stab her outside her apartment door. The only reason she lived is because I shot him in the leg. That’s not an unfortunate circumstance, that’s premeditated murder. You’d’ve been the one killing her even if that poor dead bastard was the one with the knife in his hand.” She stares at him. “And the junkie’s dead because of you, too, isn’t he? You had him killed because he knew too much.”

Fisk leans back into the armchair cushion. (She and Foggy had helped Matt pick that chair out, ages ago, when Matt had first mentioned he’d found an apartment. A material that wouldn’t bother Matt’s hypersensitivities, but that was squishy enough for Darcy and Foggy to lounge. She wants it burned.) “You overestimate how much one person can do to me, Miss Lewis. If the addict is dead, I had nothing to do with it.”

“Fine, Wesley, then,” she says. “Convenient, since he’s dead, too. Can’t say if I’m wrong or not.”

She realizes her mistake when she sees how Fisk’s fingers dig into the fabric of the armchair, sees how his eyes reflect the flickering light of the billboard. “Did you kill him?” he says, his voice so low and crooning it’s almost a lullaby. And she can see it, all at once, the Russian with his head in the door, bone splintering, flesh splitting, _wham, wham, wham,_ until body and skull are separate pieces on night-chilled asphalt. “Were you the one who killed James Wesley?”

Something inside her is screaming. _Run. Get away._ “No.” Her voice shakes. “But—but I wish I had been. He hurt people I cared about, and he deserved to die for that. I wish I’d had the chance.” No matter what it would have turned her in to, she wishes, so, so desperately, that she’d been the one to pull the trigger. Not because of what he’d done to her, but because she can see it killing Karen, too. The agony of it, and the shame. “I wish I had been the one to do it, but no. I didn’t kill James Wesley. And I don’t know who did.”

He’s going to kill her, she thinks. She wonders how he’ll do it. _It’s Fisk. He’ll use his bare hands._ Then, slowly, whatever’s unwinding inside him curls away. It’s hidden, caught up in the darkness again, and when he clears his throat and shifts the collar of his shirt he looks like a businessman in an uncomfortable share-holders meeting. “I see.”

“Is that why you’re here? To ask about Wesley?” She swallows a little. “Or did you want something else? From me? From Matt? What do you want?”

“It’s fortunate that you returned to the apartment alone.” Fisk drops one hand to his sleeve, twirling his cufflink over and over. “I would have done what was necessary, had Murdock been with you, but I do not…particularly relish the idea of killing a blind man. It seems unfair.”

He just wants her, then. _Just Darcy Lewis? Or just Lilith?_ She heaves a breath. “But that’ll change if I don’t do what you want me to, won’t it? You don’t care about hurting innocent people if it means you get what you’re looking for. All the blood Wesley spilled, that’s on your hands.”

“Wesley did what he did on my behalf. He was a good man, working for a good cause.”

“He was a psychopath serving a monster, and the world’s better for him being dead.”

Fisk’s mouth twists. He jerks his head, and she thinks: _stay away from here, Matt. Stay away_. She’d been right, after Nobu had grabbed her. She’d been _right_. _I can be replaced. What Matt can do, that’s different._ “What do you call a monster, Miss Lewis? Whatever your definition, it leaves much to be desired. Your man in the mask is just as much a monster as I am.”

“And I’m as much a monster as he is,” she says, “but you’re worse than both of us. You’re not just monstrous, you’re evil. Born or made, doesn’t matter. You’re evil, and what you’re doing is evil. You’re destroying the city to build it in your own ideal, a fairy-tale of lies and murder. One _you_ control. Because that’s all you want.”

He rumbles. “I’m the man this city needs to soar.”

“You’re the man this city created,” she says. “You’re the mirror image of its cruelty, and its brutality. Its inhumanity. It sculpted you in its own image when you were a kid, and you’ve never grown out of it.”

Fisk goes back to playing with his cufflink. When he meets her eyes, she’s staring into a lion’s den. “And you aren’t your own city, Miss Lewis? Atlanta doesn’t run in your veins like a cancer? It beats at you, batters you. The neighborhood you grew up in, the docks where your best friend rotted. None of that calls to you anymore?”

She closes her eyes. _Eli._ Of course he knows about Eli. There’s her soul, the boy she couldn’t save, dragged out from beneath a rock and set to roast over an open flame. “I left Atlanta when I was fifteen. I’ve never gone back.”

“Of course.” Fisk rolls his cufflink between two thick fingers. “We’re not so different, you and me.”

“I am _nothing_ like you.”

“Aren’t you?” He meets her eyes again. “Your mother was an alcoholic, if I remember correctly. Depressive. Barely left the house. Your father? A teenager who slept with the wrong girl and refused to deal with the consequences. He wasn’t in absentia, he was never around in the first place. You ran away from home as a teenager, and never returned, because you learned early on that you had to take care of yourself to survive. Exactly the same way I did.”

“It’s not the same. You murdered your own father with a hammer. I just left.”

“You were going to kill the man who murdered your friend,” he says, and _how can he know that?_ She reels. She’s never told anyone until these past few weeks, and only Matt and Foggy. _He can’t know that. He can’t._ “I can see it in your face. You would have killed him, not for your friend, but for yourself. And you would have enjoyed it.”

“ _I’m nothing like you_.”

The phone rings. It buzzes in her back pocket and rings, once, twice, three times. It’s the burner, so there’s no custom tone, no way for her know who’s calling her, but she doesn’t even have to look. It’s Matt. She knows it’s Matt. Fisk just looks at her, and holds out his hand. Darcy pulls the phone from her pocket— _Mike_ , it says on the screen, and she thinks, _no, no, stay away_ —and tosses it to him, because she doesn’t want to get near enough to touch him. Before he can answer it, it stops ringing.

“Mike,” he says, looking at the screen. He goes through the phone. She’s never chanced Claire’s listing from the _C_ , never added anyone’s names into the address book. It’s the only good thing about her night. Fisk blinks at her, slowly. “Who is Mike?”

“None of your business.”

“Hm.” He turns the phone over in his palms. Then, quite smoothly, he twists it apart into two pieces. The burner phone makes a terrible crunching sound, screeching a little where shorn plastic rubs up against itself. He sets both pieces to the side.

“Wanton cellular destruction,” she says. The soft parts inside her mouth hurt. “Thanks.”

“Wesley was wrong to try to recruit you.” He rests his palms against his knees. “I found it amongst his papers, after—after his body was discovered. He thought that if you could be persuaded to give up the mask, you would be an asset. But he was wrong in that. Your loyalty to the people around you blinds you to the reality of the world that we live in, Miss Lewis. We’re all monsters beneath the skin. It’s only a matter of choosing how much of that you show.”

She watches his adam’s apple bob as he speaks. She’s numb all over, curiously so, like she’s been pushed into a deep freezer. “What do you want from me, Fisk? To—we’re not talking philosophy. I’m assuming you’re here to—threaten me, or kill me, or whatever it is you’re going to do. I told you before, I’m not here to be your fucking therapist. Whatever you want, just spit it out without all the—all this Platonic and Socratic bullshit.”

 _Platonic and Socratic bullshit_ , Fisk mouths. His lips twitch. “We are all terrible reflections of each other, aren’t we?” he says. “The mask, myself. You. Wesley. Vanessa.” The name’s almost a caress. “You remind me of her. I believe I told you that in the warehouse, with Nobu. There’s something that you and she share that I haven’t been able to put my finger on, until this moment. It’s not your loyalty. You’re both highly intelligent, and highly adept at disguising that intelligence, but that’s not what it is, either. It’s your ability to cut to the heart of the matter, to see the core of a person and turn them on their heads. That’s why you’re so loyal to the man in the mask, I think. Because you see something in him that you think you can save. The same way, I believe, Vanessa thinks she can save me.”

They look at each other for a long time. Darcy wipes her sweaty hands on her leggings, hyperaware of every breath, every darting thought. “No,” she says.

“No?”

“I’ve never believed I could save him, or change him, or any of that. That’s not the point.” The world seems to fade around the edges, until she’s looking into a sepia photograph, an impressionist painting. _Moments Before Death._ “You still don’t get it. I don’t think you’re ever going to be able to get it. I did all of this because _I wanted to_. Because I need to be here. For me, not for him. Not for anybody but me.”

Fisk’s brow furrows. He watches her, eyes narrowed, forehead wrinkled, his big hands flat against his knees. _You make me better,_ Matt had said, like he’s not good enough on his own. And he makes her better, makes her remember that people can be _good_. Even if they do terrible things, they can be good in a way that makes her teeth ache and her bones hurt and her brain pound with how much effort it takes to understand it. People can be cruel and terrible, abusive and _wrong,_ but they can also be good enough to do things like save a girl they’ve never met, without any thought of a reward. They can be good enough to take everything that’s wrong with them, everything that’s broken and cut up and ruined, and use it as a weapon against the people who are destroying the world from the ground up. Ends and means don’t matter. Intentions do.

She wonders what happened to that little girl with the dockside father, who’d been betrayed by a parent she’d thought she could trust. She wonders what that girl’s name is, who she is, where she is now. How old is she? Does she know that her father was the devil’s first victim? Has she put any of it together? What has she done to put _herself_ back together? Has she helped others like her? Has she never talked about it, what happened to her? Is she like Darcy, broken inside but still walking? Is she like Kate, a Valkyrie, tall and strong and furious? Like Karen, shining through with brilliance even as her guilt crushes her? Or is she the most like Matt, angry, broken, raging against the world with his fists because it’s the only way he knows how to fix things, how to make them better? _We are the gaps in morality. We are the monsters._ And it’s not wrong to be a monster. Because if Fisk is right about anything, it’s that everyone is a monster. It’s just sometimes you need to find another person who will help you see the human inside.

“I’m here because I need to be,” she says again. “That’s all.”

“No.” Fisk shakes his head. “You don’t _need_ to be here. You’re an attorney, an instrument of the law. If you needed anything about the mask, you would have turned your back on him long ago.”

“Maybe the law doesn’t do enough,” she says. “Maybe it’s not good enough. Maybe it’s owned by the wrong people. Maybe it’s made for the rich and the famous, the whites, the straights. It’s not made for people like me, or you, or him. It’s not made for Freddie Gray or Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice or Elena Cardenas or even Hironobu Orihara. It’s not made for us. It’s made by the people in power, made so they can stay that way. We’re not talking about the law, or how it works. We’re talking about justice.”

“Yes,” he says, like she’s made a mistake, like he’s seen through her façade. “And justice is blind.”

“Justice isn’t _blind._ She’s blind _folded._ She chooses to remove sight from the equation, chooses not to see, because _that’s_ what matters. Justice is for everyone. The law is only for who makes it.” She shrugs. “She also carries a naked blade on her hip and scales in her other hand. There are three parts to Justice, and that’s the impartiality, the weighing, and the consequence. I know which part of her metaphor I’m standing with, but I don’t think you do. That’s why you’re so confused. You can’t work out what side you’re on, Wilson. You don’t know if you’re the blindness, or the weapon, or the result. And it’s driving you _crazy_.”

“No,” he says. She can feel his temper building, swirling through the air currents like fire. “I know which side I’m on. I am on the side of this city. I am going to make it better. I’m finally going to give justice back to it. It’s people like _you_ who don’t understand what I’m trying to do.”

“What you’re doing? That’s not giving justice _back_ to the city. It’s taking justice _away_. You’re drowning every voice but yours. And no one person can be justice.” _We’re all the devil, Matt. We all are._ “You’re not saving this city, you’re killing it slowly.”

He leans back in the armchair. “None of you understand,” he says. “The only way the city can thrive is if we rebuild it entirely. We take it down to the ground, and restart. The corruption, the pestilence, it has to be scourged by fire in order for Hell’s Kitchen to rebuild.”

“It’s not the same as a forest fire. If you burn a city to the ground, it doesn’t rebuild the same way. You’re just killing people.” She makes an impatient sound. “Why am I having this debate with you? I know you’re not going to understand it.”

“You’re right,” says Wilson Fisk. “I don’t understand it. I do not understand you, or your motives, and you cannot _imagine_ how irritating it is.”

“Good,” says Darcy shortly. “I’m glad. Because if you can’t understand me, if you can’t understand where I’m coming from, then we’re _not_ the same. You are _nothing_ like me, and I am nothing like you. If we were similar at all, maybe you’d get it. Because you’re not the sword or the scales or the blindfold at all. You’re the victim of the blade. You’re the crime that’s being weighed. _You’re_ the reason she chooses to wear a blindfold. Because if she sees you, she’ll see the cruelty in you. And she’ll know you’re not worth saving.”

“I know as well as you what I am,” he says. “What do you know of the Bible, Miss Lewis?”

“Probably more than you.”

“I would have thought you were less than spiritual.”

“I’m smarter than I look,” she says. “And I’ve read most of it, even if it was only to argue with bigots.”

“Then you know the story of the Good Samaritan.”

“And let me guess. You’re the Samaritan?”

“No,” he says. “I am the ill intent that besets the traveler on the road. So you’re wrong when you say I don’t know what I am. But sometimes you need darkness to bring a world back into the light.”

“Yeah, and that’s what the devil is. Darkness and evil, they’re not the same. Darkness is a method, and evil—I used to think evil was a point of view. But there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, and guess what?” She leans back, away from him. “I’d gladly be all monster if it means I’d never turn into someone like you.”

Wilson stares at her, eyes reflective and round, dark marbles. She can feel the gravity of him pulling at her, trying to draw her into his orbit. Then he closes his eyes. “I was right the first time,” he says. “I will never understand you. I’ll regret that later, I think. There’s something in you that is…fascinating.”

“Not my problem, evil-Spock. And honestly, if I can make one thing harder for you, then yeah. I’m going to do it. Considering everything you’ve done to me, it’s only fair.”

He sighs. “You will not believe me, but I have…I have mourned what you have suffered in the course of the past few weeks, Miss Lewis. Goodman and his men, in particular. His methods have always left much to be desired.”

“Yeah, because yours are so much better.” She folds her hands neatly in her lap. Her taser is three inches away from her wrist, but her aim—her aim is the problem. “You can go now, if you want. I’m done debating ethics and morality with you.”

“You’re mistaken if you think I’m leaving this place without the answer to one final question.” He flexes his fingers, as if he can feel her throat against his palms. “Why would you think that I would let any offense against my mother go unpunished?”    

Her heart drops. “Excuse me?”

“There’s a doggedness in you that I have to respect. When you find a thread, you pull on it until the whole tapestry unravels. You’re ruthless as a lawyer, Miss Lewis, but you would have been a gifted reporter, had you been so inclined.”

“Gee, thanks, Dad. I’ll rewrite my life plan now.”

“Tell me.” He flexes his fingers again. “Were you alone, when you intruded upon her privacy, used her own illness against her? Or was there someone with you?”

She blinks. Then she blinks again. “What?”

“My mother has a condition,” says Fisk. “One she’s had ever since I can remember, something she was born with. She has tritanopia. It’s a form of color-blindness, very rare, which means she cannot truly differentiate between most shades of blue and green. She sees the world in shades of red, black, grey, pink, white, and, rarely, a specific shade of turquoise.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Her illness makes it difficult to remember most things. The day of the week. What she had for breakfast. The name of her nurse. But she could tell me three things about the person who came to see her. _Dark_ , she said. _Glasses._ And _pretty blue eyes._ My first thought was Ben Urich—a dark-skinned man, bespectacled, a dedicated journalist, most certainly the kind of person who would dare to visit my mother in her retirement and her illness and to pry details of _my_ life from a sick woman who doesn’t know any better. But the blue eyes, they didn’t fit. I considered, for a moment or two, Miss Page—” Darcy’s heart stops “—but no, she is an afterthought, not worth a second glance. A secretary who has faded into obscurity willingly. The idea, though, it made me reconsider, made me realize: who else in that nest of vultures wears glasses? Who else would dig her hands deep into my private matters, disturb a woman in her nursing home to ferret out a truth that should have never been touched? Who stood between me and the devil, broken and bleeding, and still had the strength to tell me _no_?”

 _Oh my god._ She can’t breathe. _Oh my god. He thinks it’s me. Oh my god. Ben._

“And there is where my mother’s color-blindness becomes relevant, Miss Lewis, because to my mother, blue and green are the same. To her, your eyes would be—grey. She would guess, because she’s always guessed when it comes to varieties of blue and green, and blue is so much more common than green, isn’t it? But your eyes—your eyes are a striking shade of pale green, Miss Lewis, and not blue at all. _Dark. Glasses. Pretty green eyes._ ” He lifts his hands, as if to say, _who else could it be?_

“St. Benezet’s a nice place,” she says, finally. She’s looked it up online, since Karen mentioned visiting it. “Nice wallpaper. Lovely carpets. I’m sure she’s—she was very comfortable there. But you’ll have moved her by now, I’m guessing.”

“My mother is now in a place where none of you or your kind will ever bother her again,” he says, and she wonders, for a moment, if he’s killed her. “But something she said made me wonder—were you alone, when you spoke to her? Or did you take one of your friends along with you?”

 _Oh my god._ She can’t breathe _. Karen._

“No,” Darcy says, and Fisk shudders. She half-expects to see someone drawing an ice cube down his spine. “No. It was just me. I didn’t bring anyone along. I went alone. Nobody else thought it was worth the time. But I went anyway. And I found her.”

“You’re lying, Miss Lewis.” He tips his head. “I think—Mr. Urich. Fired from his position at the _Bulletin_ for everything he’s scraped together about me, bits and pieces that can’t make a functional whole—” (and it hits her like a punch, Ben being fired, Ben losing everything because of them, Ben maybe losing his life because of their fuck-ups, _Ben_ ) “—yes. It would be Mr. Urich.”

“No, it was just—it was only me.”

“All the same, my men are on their way to pay a visit to Mr. Urich as we speak. If you’re telling the truth, well. There’s another loose end cleaned up. And if you’re lying, then the result is the same.”

 _Oh, Jesus._ Ben. And Kate. Ben and Kate, with Fisk’s men coming for them. “He didn’t have anything to do with this! He didn’t go near your mother, it was only—it was me, just me, leave Ben out of it—”

“Your loyalty is commendable,” he says. “But you’ve forgotten something. I am not a forgiving man. And you went after my mother, Darcy Lewis.” He stands. His hands clench, and unclench. “ _My mother_ ,” he says again, and the whole room vibrates with the force of his rage. “Nothing you say or do matters anymore. Because you went after my _mother_. And I’m not going to hurt you for that. I’m not going to let you have a chance to repent. I am going to _kill you_ ,” he says, and his voice is so loud that there’s nothing left of her but hearing it; it vibrates through her, crashes like a tsunami, smashing her against the rocks. Darcy screams, and flings herself off the couch when he lunges for her. The makeshift coffee table, the carton that she’d pulled from the closet, fractures when it hits the wall. The world fractures too, into pieces she can’t quite make sense of. There’s a fist in her hoodie, yanking her back. Her wrist is made of fire and acid and brimstone. There’s a beer bottle in her hand; she smashes it over something hard. Glass sprays. There’s blood on her lip. Her scalp burns. And then there’s a hand over her throat, pushing, pushing, pushing. Spots burst in front of her eyes. She wrenches her legs, but he’s too heavy, he’s pinned her, and he’s pushing, and she can’t scream—

—can’t breathe—

—there’s something hard being jammed into her hip, he’s pushing, her lungs are screaming, pushing, the world is fading—

— _somebody help me—_

 _—_ and then her hand’s closed around something sharp and plasticky and she’s jabbed it into his neck and she’s pushing, pushing, pushing, and the screech of the taser makes static crack between her teeth—

—his fingers go tight, he doesn’t stop, doesn’t blink, just stares at her—

— _hit the button again, come on, come on—_

—and she keeps pushing, and the taser jerks in her hand, she smells something burning, plastic, cloth, flesh—

— _the pop of bone and the stench of gasoline and cold concrete, tacky blood between her toes—_  

—and then she’s sobbing on the ground, Fisk is lying on her legs, and the taser’s skittered away under the couch. Her lungs are burning. She can’t breathe. She heaves, and heaves again. Blood trickles down his temple from a cut over his eye. There are two blackened places on the side of his neck where the taser’s burned him. He’s breathing, not moving. Darcy grabs the taser, wrenches herself out from under him, and she flees. She runs without purpose, without direction, out the door and down the stairs and out into the street, and if she throws her guts up in an alleyway before she stops, that’s nobody’s business but hers.

.

.

.

The phone rings.

“Darcy, Jesus Christ, where the hell have you been? Your phone was disconnected and the apartment was empty, I couldn’t—”

“Whoa, dude. Slow down. Why are you looking for Darcy?”

“Bishop. Why are you calling me?”

“Uh-uh, I asked first.”

“Do _not_ pull that bullshit with me right now, Bishop. _Why are you calling me?_ ”

“Thought you’d like to know that Emperor Palpatine sent some goons after us.” A muffled curseword. “Shut up, Ben, I’m driving fine. You keep—you keep that on your chest, you hear me? Pressure stops bleeding, and Doris is gonna _kill me_ if you die because I couldn’t get you to _cover up your motherfucking stab wound_.”

“Ben’s all right?”

“Yeah, Ben’s gonna be fine, if he does what I tell him to do.” Her voice shakes. “Yeah, uh, there were like—fifty million of them, and I’m down to like two arrows and I’m _pretty_ sure they’re following us, so I’m just—driving in circles. Near, um, near Penn Station. And traffic is hell even at three in the morning. Where the fuck are you?”

“Somewhere I really don’t want to be.” There are still sirens going off nearby. He thinks of Brett. _Get down on the ground._ The phone clicking, ringing out. _The number you have dialed is not in service. Please hang up and try again later._ “I’ll come find you.”

“Yeah, uh, if I—if I stop they’re probably gonna shoot us. They’re not so ballsy as to do a drive-by in the middle of downtown. Except maybe they are because _holy shit_ I think they have—Ben, keep your head down, Christ on a potato chip I’m going to fucking _kill_ you if you die, Urich—” 

“ _Kate_!”

“I’m fine! I’m fine! Just—uh, shit. Cops. Mask, you mind if I call you back?”

“ _Don’t you dare hang up on me, Kate Bishop!_ ”

“Jesus, don’t get your boxers in a bunch.” Muffled voices. “Here.”

“Mask, it’s me.”

“Ben, what the hell is going on?”

“Fisk decided to send a few of his friends to deal with us. Didn’t say why. Guess he’s finally sick of us nosing around. You know anyone else he might try to take out?”

“I can think of a few people.”

“Kate, if you put one scratch on my car—”

“—for god’s sake, Ben, _shut up and keep your head down_!”

“—Jesus Christ—”

“ _Ben_.”

“I’m fine. Kate, Jesus, watch the— _red light, red light—_ ”

“— _the cops are already chasing us, it’s not like it matters—_ ”

The phone rings.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll call you right back. All right? Right back. Stay moving, don’t stop.”

“Shit,” says Ben. “Yes, fine, we can do that. _Kate, mirror_!”

He hangs up. Hits accept.

“Matt, it’s Karen, Darcy gave me this number. Where are you?”

He’s sitting on a fire escape two buildings down from his own, trying to catch a scent, a sound, anything, but the city is too cacophonous. He can barely hear over his own heartbeat. “Doesn’t matter. What the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know, I just—Darcy’s not answering her phone, it keeps saying it’s disconnected, Foggy and me went to Elena’s to see if she was there but we can’t find her anywhere, please tell me she’s with you—”

“I sent her back to the apartment an hour ago.” He hits the wall, once, twice. “ _Fuck._ ”

“Where the hell are you?”

“I’ll meet you in five minutes. Keep away from the windows, turn off the lights. Don’t let anybody see you there.”

“Matt—”

The phone rings.

“I’ll call you back.”

“Matt Murdock, I swear to god, if you hang up right now—”

“Five minutes, Karen.”

“You son of a _—_ ”

He hangs up. Hits accept.

“Matt, it’s me.”

“Claire?”

“Santino just called me. He said Darcy’s in my apartment and she’s, uh. She’s not doing too good. What the hell is going on down there?”

A ragged breath. _No._ “She’s okay?”

“I don’t know, he just said she was hysterical and didn’t seem to hear anything he was saying. I’m coming back down to the city, my train leaves in twenty minutes. I get the feeling I’ll do more good there than I am cooling my heels up here.”

“I’ll have someone meet you.”

“I’ll be fine on my own. Go—go deal with whatever shit you’ve dug yourself into. See you in three hours.” The buzz of an announcer over the line. “Can’t say I really missed any of this.”

“I’m sending people to your apartment. They’ll keep Santino safe, Claire.”

“They’d fucking better, Matt. If there’s one scratch on that boy, I’ll destroy everything you love.”

He hangs up without replying. Dials a number.

“Matthew Murdock, you son of a fucking bitch, I’m going to fucking kill you for hanging up on me!”

“Karen, shut up and listen to me. Fisk went after Kate and Ben and I’m pretty sure he tried to do something to Darcy, which means we’re all at risk. I need you and Foggy to go to the address I’m about to give you, and I need you to _stay there_.”

“Matt, what the hell—”

“Karen, just— _listen,_ okay, I need—you need to call Jen and Elena and get them out of the apartment, have them go somewhere, anywhere, they just have to get out of the apartment as soon as possible. _Don’t_ let them tell you where they’re going, just make sure they go somewhere safe, and that they leave _now._ Do you understand?”

“Yeah, I understand, but—”

“Get a pen. Write down this address.” He recites it from memory, trying hard not to think of the twists and turns of the alley, the hollow echo of the dumpster against his fingers. “Get there as soon as you can. Stay off the main streets. Don’t take a cab. Shouldn’t take you more than fifteen minutes. Third floor, second door on the right. Where are you going?”

“Third floor, second door on the right. But Matt—”

“I have to help Kate and Ben. I’ll call you when I’m on my way.” His lungs are empty. He fills them. _Can’t function with no air._ “Keep them both safe, Karen.”

“ _Matt_!”

There’s nothing but a dial tone.

.

.

.

It must be close to midnight when Vanessa opens her eyes to find Iris standing at the end of Wilson’s bed. It’s not entirely unexpected. She’s heard mutterings from her guards for the past hour or so, about the Triad, and the mask, and fuck-ups that no one can fix. Still, she jumps, hating the way her skin jumps counter to her, as if her muscles and her flesh are no longer fully connected. Then she blinks at Iris, slowly, and says, “The mask managed to get to you too, then.”

“He is playing a game he hasn’t even begun to understand,” Iris snaps. “He has taken _everything_ from me. He has no idea what he has set in motion.”

“Well, he seems to enjoy playing with fire, from what I’ve heard of him.” She heaves herself up onto her elbows, propping her spine against the head of the bed. Her body burns the worst when she’s just waking, when her nerves are rousing from slumber and realize the way they’ve been scraped raw. “Should I apologize?”

“No.” Iris shakes her head once. “It was going to happen. From what my men tell me, this has not been a productive night for any of us. Wilson has failed in his quest to take revenge for his mother.”

Her heart freezes solid. “He’s alive?”

“He’s alive, or he should be. The girl was half his weight, only disabled him temporarily. He has a habit of underestimating small women, I think.” Iris peers at her. She holds her cane loosely by her side, not propped up on it, but as a weapon. “I came to tell you I was leaving. I thought it courteous.”

“Shame,” says Vanessa. Her mouth feels like blu-tac. What does _disabled him temporarily_ mean? “Your special men haven’t even arrived yet.”

“They will, soon. My offer to you still stands.” She does not smile. “Do not attempt to contact me for three weeks, after it is all over. I must consider what has happened here, where we all went wrong. Perhaps it was at the very beginning. But our bargain remains intact. You will remain free, and learn how to control what will be left behind by the chaos, and in return you will find me my man.”

“You haven’t even told me who he is, yet.”

“That doesn’t matter. Not right now.” She cocks her head. “Can’t you hear the way your lover’s castle is tumbling around his ears? And all because he underestimated a single man in a cheap mask.”

“It wasn’t just him,” says Vanessa, stung. “From what I’ve heard, the mask has allies, friends. A network. They’ve been—”

“I do not care what they’ve been doing,” says Iris. “Whether it was the masked man or the lawyer woman or the reporter or the socialite, it _does not matter._ Somehow they made their way to me, and tonight more than forty people have lost their jobs, their incomes, their freedom. They will be returned to where they came from, and they will go back blind, because the promises I made to them have all turned out to be lies.”

Vanessa cannot speak. She looks at Iris, and Iris stares back at her, unblinking, as if she’s waiting for something. For Vanessa to cry, maybe. For her to scream, and rage, and howl. For her to curse this lawyer woman, this nameless man in the mask, this reporter, this socialite. For her to rebel against reality. But Vanessa’s always been a logical woman. “Give them to me,” she says. “Your people. Have them sent to me. I own a house, upstate, a place where they can live. I know what it’s like to come to this country not knowing anything, not knowing what is safe. Send them to me. I’ll take care of them.”

Iris closes her eyes, lets out a breath. “Only a handful escaped. The rest will be deported.”

“I’ll get them out before they are,” Vanessa says. “Wilson has pull in all of the precincts. And I know for certain that one of these men must have some idea of how to get identification for your people, passports, IDs. I can make it happen, Iris. You just need to get them ready.”

Iris _watches_ her. Then she turns away, and makes a call. Vanessa makes a mental note to learn Chinese. If she’s to have any number of Chinese tenants in the near future, it seems expedient to at least be able to speak with them. It’s only once Iris has hung up, and rested her cane on the carpet again, that she clears her throat. “Why else are you here, Iris?”

“When I attempted to have you killed, I was not alone. Wilson works with a man named Leland Owlsley, of Silver and Brent. He came to me claiming that you were pushing Mr. Fisk off-course, that the plan has been disintegrating since your entrance into Wilson’s life. That _you_ are the reason it all began to fail.”

Something cool and smooth, like silver, begins to coil through her veins. “Do you believe him?”

“Of course not,” says Iris in disgust. “I believe that your man caused his own downfall, assisted by the interference of the devil in the mask. But your removal, at the time, seemed…expedient to business. I no longer agree.”

“And why are you telling me this?”

“Because Leland Owlsley will see what has happened tonight, and he will betray you,” says Iris. “He will betray Wilson, he will betray the ideal that Wilson has for this city, he will betray all that you and Wilson Fisk stand for, and he will do it without a qualm. If any of us has no heart, it is Leland Owlsley. He has men everywhere, spies on all of us. The head of your guards, that’s one of Owlsley’s men.”

“Francis?”

“A friend of Leland’s son,” says Iris. “Name changed, background rewritten, but it is the same man. I heard it from Leland himself. He has always been watching, waiting for Wilson to make a mistake. And if the lawyer woman tells anyone about the attack tonight, then Leland will have the opportunity he has been longing for. He will take everything Wilson has built, and turn it into a monument to himself.”

Vanessa says nothing. She simply looks at Iris, and waits.

“I was not entirely opposed to the idea of Wilson’s new city,” says Iris. “I suppose it’s a foolish ideal, but then, ideals in and of themselves are foolish. The Japanese, the Hand, they came for the properties Wilson could supply.” _The Hand?_ Vanessa thinks, but Iris has already moved on. “The Russians came for blood, for territory, to carve their mark on a new nation and call it their own. Owlsley, he came for the money. I came for the opportunities it presented, for myself, for my people. But there is something in the dream that…a touching thing. I respected Wilson Fisk then. If I respect him now, or not, that is irrelevant. I respected him then for his willingness to do what must be done, and I believe it is a quality that you share with him.”

“What do you want from me, Iris?”

“What I want is not the point. It’s what you ought to do. It’s what you _want_ to do.” She stands, and waits. “What is it you want to do, Vanessa?”

Iris doesn’t wait for an answer. She slips out of the bedroom, and a moment later, Vanessa hears the front door close with a snap. There’s no sound from the bodyguards in the penthouse, no sign that there is any other living person on the whole floor. Vanessa slips out of bed. The cuffs of Wilson’s shirt dangle past her hands, trapping her inside it like she’s a child in her father’s clothes. She goes into the closet, and she sorts through the few things she’s left here since she’s started seeing Wilson, skirts, dresses, coats. She chooses the clinging white dress that she’d worn the night James Wesley had driven her to Wilson’s for the first time, the one with half-sleeves and a square neckline that shows off her collarbones. It hangs off her in a way that’s almost skeletal. There’s a bruise on the inside of her arm from the IV, and her eyes are hollow. She pulls the dress on anyway, and tugs a comb through her hair. By the time she’s applied her make-up, pulled up her pantyhose, and found her matching shoes, the men on the floor of the living room have begun to stir. She kicks the leader, the one with bruises, Francis, none-too-gently in the ribs. Pain lances up her leg.

“Get up,” she says in disgust. Francis blinks slowly, and looks up at her with an expression almost like awe. She knows how she looks. She looks like she’s untouchable. She looks like Vanessa Marianna again. “Could you imagine what would happen if Wilson were to come back to find you sleeping on the job?”

She knows for a fact that Wilson’s the one who broke Francis’s nose. She knows it from how white he turns at the thought, as if all his blood has simply vanished from inside his skin. He puts a hand to his head, and heaves himself up from the floor. She doesn’t offer a hand to assist. “Miss Marianna, what are you doing out of bed? You shouldn’t be—”

“I think I know best when it comes to what I should and shouldn’t be doing,” Vanessa says. “And I think I know my body better than anyone, Francis. What it can and can’t handle, that’s up to me.” She looks over at the kitchen, where another of her guards, Tomas, is now lying in a puddle of orange juice. It drips onto his cheek like blood. “I assume she left you all alive, if you’re still breathing.”

Francis looks her over. “You—how did you—Madame Gao—”

“ _Madame Gao_ and I have an understanding.” Vanessa collects her coat from the couch, and hooks it around her shoulders. “Get your men up, Francis. We’re going for a drive.”

“But Miss Marianna—”

“Don’t make me say please,” she says, checking that the .22 is still in her purse. It is. “I very much dislike having to say please. It makes me feel like a cheap whore.” She pulls her phone from her purse, hits speed dial. “Your men, Francis. Get them up. This isn’t kindergarten. Mr. Fisk doesn’t pay for them to have nap-time.”

His face contorts. For an instant, she thinks he’s going to strike her. Then she turns, rests one hand on her hip, and she just _looks_ at him, the same way she looks at Pieter at the gallery when he puts a painting in the wrong place, the same way she’s always looked at men who have told her no, a look that says _you will not like me when I’m angry._ He opens his mouth, and then closes it again. “Very well,” he says, and he heaves himself to his feet to go and kick the others awake. (And he does kick them, with a lot of swearing and muttering and a curse or two of _fucking bitch_ under his breath. She pretends not to hear.) The phone rings longer than she would ever like it to, but finally, he picks up. 

“Hello?”

“Wilson, darling,” says Vanessa. “I’ve just had some very bad news. Are you all right?”

“I would be better,” says Wilson shortly, his voice husky and rasping in a way she doesn’t recognize, “if I had broken the taser.”

Air gusts out of her. “I thought the armor conducted electricity?”

“She didn’t hit the armor,” he says. “She hit me in the throat.”

 _Oh, god._ She closes her eyes, takes a breath. Lets it out again. “Well, we’ll deal with it,” she says, because that’s what they always do. They deal with it. “But right now, there’s something more important that’s happened. Madame Gao has had to leave the country unexpectedly, and it seems that I’ve obtained her people in the meantime.”

“….what.”

“We’ll need to break most of them out of police custody before they’re deported, of course, but they’re mine, and I will handle it.” She tips her head to hook an earring into her ear. “Are you well enough to have a council meeting, my love?”

He’s silent for a moment. “Vanessa. I didn’t mean to draw you into this.”

“I chose to come, remember?” Vanessa puts in her other earring. Then she tucks the phone between her ear and her shoulder, and pops the clip out of her gun. It’s still full. She snaps it back into place. “I wouldn’t still be here if I couldn’t handle a few little bumps along the road. And besides, I’ll have help. You will help me, gentlemen, won’t you?”

Francis, whose eyes are fixed on her gun, jumps, and nods. Behind him, the others—Tomas, Jeffries, Christian—dip and lift like bobbleheads. “Of course, Miss Marianna.”

“Excellent.” She lets her mouth curve up. “Oh, before I forget.”

She turns, raising the gun in one fluid movement, and fires before any of them can twitch. The back of Francis’s head explodes outwards in slow motion. He hits the ground with a wet smack, blood trickling down from his forehead, bone and brain scattered over the rich white carpet. Her arm aches from the recoil, her nerves singing with the shock of it. Tomas and Jeffries have their hands on their weapons. Christian, who was standing beside him, touches his fingers to his cheek, and rubs the blood between his thumb and forefinger.

“ _Vanessa,_ ” Wilson says from the other end of the line, but she just puts the phone back to her ear, and sets her pistol back on safety.

“It’s nothing, Wilson. Dealing with trash.” For a long, terrible moment, Wilson doesn’t say a thing. Her throat constricts. “Darling, are you still there?”

“Yes,” says Wilson, who sounds rather as if someone’s just knocked him over the head. “I’m here.”

“Iris—Madame Gao—told me something rather interesting before she had to leave. She had to make her plane on time, I think. Poor woman. Her arthritis must be killing her.” She hooks her purse over her shoulder. “Tomas, Jeffries, Christian and I are going to go and liberate my people from federal custody. If you could meet me at the Confederated Global offices in—an hour, perhaps? What do you think, Christian, an hour to break Madame Gao’s ducklings out of their cage?”

“Two,” says Christian. He’s looking at her as if he’s just fallen in love. “Two hours. If we’re lucky.”

“Two and a half hours, then. If you could meet me at Confederated Global in two and a half hours that would be perfect.” Wilson says nothing. “Wilson? Did the phone break up?”

“No, I heard you.” He heaves a breath. “Two and a half hours at Confederated Global. You’re certain you’re well enough to be able to handle that?”

“Darling, I don’t need protecting. I’m more than capable of handling myself.” She glances over at Christian. “Besides, it needs to be done. Don’t you think?”

“Yes, of course. I just don’t want you to overexert yourself when you’re still recovering.”

“I’ll be perfectly all right, Wilson.” She smiles a little, a real one, this time. “If you could please make sure that Mr. Owlsley attends the meeting, though, I would truly appreciate it.”

He doesn’t ask. Wilson says, “I love you,” and then hangs up. Vanessa turns her phone on silent, and slips it back into her purse beside the gun. Christian’s still watching her. She decides to keep an eye on him. “Tomas, if you could ensure that Francis is cleaned up by the time we return? I wouldn’t like to come back and find that he’s left a completely irrevocable stain on the carpet.”

“Of course, Miss Marianna.”

“Miss Vanessa is fine,” she says. “Jeffries, have Kristopher bring the car around. One of you contact our people in immigration, I’m certain there must be someone. And Christian, if you could make certain that the 15th Precinct is prepped for our arrival, I would appreciate it.”

“Of course, Miss Vanessa.”  

“Well,” she says, as they snap to do her bidding. “I think this is going to be a long night.”

.

.

.

Darcy comes back to herself on the couch in Claire’s apartment, sitting with her knees pressed up against her chest and her taser crushed in one hand. She blinks, slowly. She can’t focus very well, but she thinks there’s a rerun of _Friends_ playing on the TV. Phoebe is singing about hair. There’s a blanket around her shoulders, and cold food on the table next to the remote, something that looks like rice and a burrito. She hears clanking in the kitchen, and she turns her face to see a tall, thin silhouette with a high ponytail. Too tall and fair to be Claire—but Claire’s in Albany anyway, isn’t she? She wouldn’t be here. The catch of breath, though, that’s familiar.

“Hey,” says Karen, and she comes around to sit beside Darcy on the sofa. Darcy looks at her for a long time. She feels as though she’s just come out of a very long, very deep sleep, and nothing quite makes sense anymore. Another tall, thin person—male, this time—traipses after Karen without a word, his feet soundless on the wood floor. When she squints, she can make out the flash of an earring and the bob of a ponytail that means Santino. “Can you hear us, finally?”

Darcy shakes her head once. She feels very cold.

“Do you think she understands?” asks Santino. He has the buzz of the city under his tongue. He crouches in front of her, tipping his head. She can almost make out his expression from this close. “Darcy? Do you remember me? I’m Santino. I stay in Claire’s apartment sometimes.”

She licks her lips twice. “I remember you.”

“Oh, thank god,” says Karen. Her voice cracks. “Matt called and said something had happened to you, but he couldn’t tell me what. We came straight over.”

She can’t remember getting here. Actually, she can’t really remember anything other than the terror and the panic and the running. Her mouth tastes like puke. _Fisk tried to kill me,_ she thinks. It’s a miracle she’s alive. “Oh.” Her throat burns, and her voice is too hoarse. She feels as though she’s been buried alive, and has just crawled back into the world again. _Birth in reverse._ “Okay.”

“You came in about two hours ago,” Santino says, and perches on the arm of the couch. His knee knocks against her shoulder. She almost flinches, and then makes herself stay still. If she squints very hard, she can see that there are some terrible scratches over his cheek. Vaguely she can recall someone grabbing her, trying to shift her somewhere, and when she looks down at her hands, there’s blood crusted under her nails. “You, uh. You weren’t doing too good. TV seemed to help. And then they came, and you quieted down a little, but. Yeah.”

“I think I need to throw up again,” she says, and leaves for the bathroom before either Karen or Santino can say anything else. Claire’s bathroom smells like green apple shampoo and leftover henna (she finds some in the cabinet when she looks) but Darcy just pushes back the toilet seat and heaves until there’s nothing left inside her. She wants to peel her nails away by the roots. Her taser never leaves her hand. There’s a scream caught between her molars, eating away at her jaw like meth. _Ben,_ she thinks. _Kate and Ben._ She presses her forehead to the cool porcelain of the toilet, and then throws up again.

She’s not sure how long she sits there before someone knocks on the door. She hasn’t locked it, so when she doesn’t answer, Karen just opens it, and stands there looking at her. She sighs through her nose, and then crouches down next to her like a child would, her knees tucked up under her chin. “You’re scaring Santino,” she tells her, and Darcy hiccups on a laugh. Her throat stings. “And me,” Karen adds. “Darcy, what happened?”

“I’m fine,” she says, but it’s so far from the truth that Karen actually laughs.

“Bullshit you’re fine.” She rubs Darcy’s back, quietly. Darcy heaves again, but this time only water comes up. “Foggy’s on the phone with Jen and Elena, making sure they made it out of the apartment safe. And Matt’s on his way, I think. He said he had—he said he had to make sure Kate and Ben were all right.”

Her heart stutters. “Kate—Fisk said—”

“They’re okay, last I heard.” She keeps stroking Darcy’s back, the way she would a cat. “Matt said he’d call when he’s on his way, and he’s not yet, so we’re just—waiting. There’s—there’s nothing on the news or anything, not that we could find. Not about any of them. ”

Darcy closes her eyes.

“Fisk came for you, didn’t he?” Karen says, and her lower lip trembles. “Fisk—Fisk came after you, at Matt’s apartment. And he was going to come for us next.”

She shakes her head, blindly. “I don’t—I don’t think he’d worked out you and Foggy yet. Just—just me. And Ben. He didn’t know Kate was there.” Talking hurts her throat, so she stops after that. Karen touches her fingertips to Darcy’s shoulder blade, and then hooks her hand around Darcy’s elbow.

“Come on, honey,” she says. “You need to get up. Can’t stay in the bathroom for the rest of your life.”

“Bathroom doesn’t try to kill me,” Darcy rasps, but she lets Karen heave her up off the floor anyway. When she catches sight of herself in the mirror, there’s a dark purple collar around her throat. It’s shaped like fingers.

 _This is what Karen felt,_ she thinks. _In the precinct. This is how it feels when someone tries to kill you._

She really doesn’t like it.

Santino’s sitting on the counter in the kitchen when they get back into the main room. She's steadied out enough that the world comes back into crooked focus—the worry on Karen’s face, the scratches on Santino’s cheek. He gives her a long, considering look, and crosses his arms over his chest. She should have washed her hands. “I’m not going to hurt you again,” she croaks through her broken throat. “I’m _not_.”

“I know,” Santino says, even when his cheek is still crusty with blood. “I know. I startled you. It was my fault, anyway.”

“No,” says Karen. “It was no one’s fault. This was no one’s fault.” She touches Darcy’s arm, and then stands. “I’m gonna get Foggy. Okay? I’ll be right back.”

“Okay.” It’s illogical that that should terrify her, having Foggy see her like this. She’s pretty sure he’s already seen her like this. She can’t really remember it, but he had to have. She stands. “I’m—I’m gonna wash my hands.”

“Okay,” says Karen, too gently. She goes to the front door, unlocks it, and slips out. Santino doesn’t budge from his spot on the kitchen counter as she creeps past him, and turns on the sink as hot as she can get it. She’s not entirely sure what she’s doing. It wasn’t like this after the Goodman attack. Then she’d been furious. Now she’s—she doesn’t even know what she is now. Hollow inside.

“You’re Lilith,” says Santino, cocking his head to the side. Darcy shivers, and stares back at him, unblinking.

“What makes you say that?”

“Why else would someone like Wilson Fisk want to kill you?”

She nearly laughs, then, because in spite of everything, she’s pretty sure Wilson Fisk still hasn’t worked out that she’s Lilith. Or that Lilith even really exists. Lynch had been tripping balls at the time, after all. “Yeah, I’m Lilith.”

“Same way that blind guy, that’s the devil.”

“Yeah.”  

“And you guys are what, superheroes?”

“Nothing super about me,” she tells him, this boy who doesn’t know anything about it, this kid that Claire takes care of, this boy with an alcoholic mother and a bruised, beaten look, as if he still thinks the Russians are coming for him. “I’m just me.”

“I don’t know. You survived a guy like Wilson Fisk trying to kill you. That’s pretty super.” He eyes her. “Seriously, no special powers? I think the devil has some. No way a blind dude can do shit like what he does without them.”

“Yeah, he has—he has special powers. I don’t.” The words catch in her sore throat. “I’m just me. I’m—I’m just normal.”

Santino rocks back and forth on the counter for a moment. “But you’re doing the superhero thing anyway.”

She shrugs. “Somebody—I feel like somebody needs to do something.”

“Claire says you’re a lawyer.”

“Yeah, sorta.”

“So, like, you rescue people on both sides of the law?”

“Yeah, sorta.”

“And—and you use your taser mostly? You have a disguise and stuff?”

“Yeah,” she says again. “Sorta.”

He considers that for a long time. “So you’re like the Black Widow, then.”

She snorts. It makes her whole body ache. “Yeah, sure. Like the Black Widow.”

Santino just keeps _watching_ her. She’s not sure if it’s because of hero worship or because he’s trying to figure her out or if he just has nothing else to watch, here in this apartment with Karen and Foggy and Darcy all wrapped up in their own concerns, but it’s not…it’s not weird, exactly. She just hasn’t been watched so closely in a while. Not since she first met Kate.

“Lilith,” he says. “From the Bible?”

“Sorta.”

“Cool. Choose it on purpose?”

“Friend came up with it.”

“And—and you work with the devil?”

“Mostly.” _Matt._ She wants him here, with her, his arms and his heart and his stupid, stupid face. _Matt, where are you?_ “What’s with the third degree?”

“I’m interested,” he says. “There’s this kid near the CVS down the street, calls himself Reynardine? Nice guy. Said that you rescued a few friends of his when Tandy was roofied.”

“Tandy Bowen?”

“Dunno her last name. Never met ‘em. Friend of a friend of a friend. But like, word goes fast with street kids. He was super jazzed about you, Reynardine. Said you were a total badass. Told the rich white bastard who tried it with Tandy to fuck off. Tased him in the balls.”

“Well.” She debates. “It—it wasn’t the balls.”

“But you tased him?”

She grabs the taser off the counter, and lifts it. Santino’s eyes get a little big, but he grins wide.

“Reynardine’s gonna kill me. Hasn’t shut up about you. And you’re in my kitchen.”

“Claire’s kitchen.”

“My kitchen more than hers. Claire can’t cook worth shit.”

“I’m sure she loves hearing that.” She frets a little. “It only happened a few nights ago, though.”

“Word travels fast,” he says again. “Kids in the Kitchen, we look out for each other. Y’know? _Mi casa._ ” There’s a knock on the door, two fast, one slow, two fast, and he slips off the counter. “This Fisk asshole, you tase him too?”

— _the taser jams back into her hand as she rams it into the side of his throat, and he chokes, but she’s already pressing the button, over and over and over_ —

“Yeah, tased him too.”

“Fuckin’ boss-ass lady,” Santino tells her, and then opens the door. “You hear?” he tells Foggy, who’s going up on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder. “Hell’s Kitchen has two superheroes. Never have to worry about anything again.” And oh, god, that hurts, because she’s done nothing but fail and this kid still has faith in her, she can’t live up to that, how could anybody live up to that? She _can’t._

“Darcy,” Foggy says, and Darcy puts her taser down. Her eyes are burning again. “Darcy, oh my god.”

She darts into him the same moment he opens his arms. Foggy smells like sweat and old tortillas and home, and he nearly lifts her off her feet with the force of the hug, his face pressed into her hair and his hands shaking as he pats her back and tries to shake her all at once. He can’t seem to say anything in order anymore. “—scared the shit out of me—thought you were dead—not supposed to go anywhere alone—gonna _kill_ Matt—”

“Where are Jen and Elena, where did they go—”

“I don’t know, but Jen—Jen says they’re safe, no one knows they’re there, they can stay there for a day or two, she’s calling in some sick days, really fucking pissed about it but she did it ‘cause we asked nice—” He pulls back, searches her face. “Jesus, Darcy, what happened? You’re—you’re not allowed to turn up half-dead again, okay, it’s not—it’s not _okay—_ ”

“He tried to kill me,” she says, and there’s hot streaks over her cheeks. “I’m not like him, Foggy, I’m not, I’m not, I’m nothing like him—”

“No, shhh, you’re not,” says Karen, and she puts her arms around them too, so they’re a Nelson-Page-Lewis sandwich, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Santino head off to do the dishes with his Turtle Beach headphones plastered firmly over his ears. “Honey, we know you’re not.”

“—knew about Eli, don’t know how he knew about Eli, he was gonna kill me, he thought—he thought I’d gone after his mother and he tried to k-kill Ben—” She can’t cry. Not now. Not when they’re so close to the ending. “—if he’s hurt Kate or Ben—”

“Darce, hey, Lewis, shhhh,” says Foggy, but she’s already sobbing, she can’t stop, and her whole body aches with the force of it. She’s going to lose her voice or lose her mind or lose them both, and she doesn’t know how to stop it.

“—knew about Atlanta and Eli and Eli’s dad and h-he said we were all the same, me and Matt and Fisk, he said that we were all—all r-reflections, all the s-same, all monsters, and we’re not, we’re monsters but we’re not evil, Foggy, we’re not evil like he is, and I can’t, I can’t—”

Foggy shushes her again, but she’s bawling. She can’t hold herself up. Karen catches her before she hits the ground, and Darcy digs her fingernails into Karen’s ribs and sobs until she can’t breathe. Foggy pets her back, his arms around both of them, and Karen holds her close, and she knows she’s leaning too hard on them both, knows that they have no idea how to handle her breaking down—when she’s the one who always holds them, when _she’s_ the one they go to—but she can’t help it, Fisk tried to kill her and she can’t help it, she can still feel his fingers around her throat and she can’t, she can’t—

She only realizes she’s speaking aloud when she hears Karen suck in a ragged breath, hears her hiccup on a sob, hears Foggy say “ _fuck,_ ” low and vicious under his breath. Darcy opens her mouth, and then closes it again, shaking her head, pressing her face into the collar of Karen’s Oracle T-shirt. She pulls away a little. “I’m sorry, I’m dumb, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—I’m sorry—”

“Darcy,” says Foggy. “Listen to me. You’re nothing like that son of a bitch, you hear me? You’re _not_.”

“But I—”

“No.” He shakes his head, presses his jaw into her temple. “No, no. No. Shut up. Bagel Brigade rights. You’re like—you’re like a really pissy little cat half the time, but Fisk is a—a fuckin’ polar bear on steroids or something, I don’t know. Completely different genuses.”

“Families,” Karen corrects.

“What the fuck ever, Page. Family, genus, phylum, whatever. Different. Different things.” He pets her hair. “Different things, okay? You’re not Fisk.”

“But I—and he—”

“The bastard tried to kill you. You just tased him and ran the fuck away. I think that tells you how different the pair of you are.”

 _But I want him dead,_ she nearly says, and she thinks Karen can see it. She sees Karen’s eyes flicker, and Karen hooks her hand into Darcy’s hair, presses her mouth to Darcy’s forehead, and rocks her quietly back and forth, because Karen the murderer, Karen the executioner, Karen with Wesley’s blood on her hands: Karen knows. Foggy misses it all, or she hopes he does. He always sees more than she thinks.

“If you were anything like Fisk, I wouldn’t be here,” he tells her. “Not for you and not for Matt. I don’t—I don’t understand what you guys do, not the way Kate does or even Karen does, apparently, but—but you’re my best friends. And if what that kid said is true, turns out you’re—you’re actually kind of heroes. And I’m not leaving you because of this. And—and I _know_ you. I know you better than I know my own mother, for god’s sake. Darcy, I know you, and I know you’re not like Fisk.” He touches her cheek, her bruised throat, her shoulder. “You’re not like Fisk.”

She looks at him then, this person she’s seen grow from boy to man to lawyer to badass, and she pulls away from Karen. Darcy wraps her arms tight around Foggy, and Foggy wraps his arms tight around her, and they stand and rock and cry, together. “Foggy,” she says, over and over, “Foggy, Foggy, Foggy,” and he squeezes her until her ribs hurt, because he’s _here,_ he’s still here, and she’d been so, so scared that he was still going to leave them, even after everything. “Please don’t leave, Foggy, don’t leave, I couldn’t handle it if you leave, you can’t, you can’t—”

“I’m not, shut up, I’m not _leaving,_ you stupid fucking asshole, Jesus Christ, I’m going to hurt you so bad when you’re not dying—”

“You two,” says Karen, her voice cracking and tears streaming down her cheeks, fucking with her make-up, “are _such enormous dumbasses_.” Foggy opens his mouth to respond, but Karen just flings her arms around the pair of them, and then they’re all crying, and Santino’s humming as loudly as he can to _The Only Difference Between Martyrdom And Suicide Is Press Coverage_ by Panic! At The Disco, and it’s so ridiculous that she just starts to laugh. Her throat hurts bad enough that it burns, but she’s laughing and crying at once, and that’s probably a hell of a lot better than it could be.

Claire shows up about an hour later. She looks better, Darcy thinks. She’s—she’s warmer, somehow. Some of the bruises have faded, inside and out. She dumps her shit just inside the door, kicks off her shoes, and shoves herself between Karen and Darcy, hooking her arms around Darcy’s waist and pressing her head into Darcy’s shoulder, because Darcy bursts into tears again at the sight of her. She’s had half her hair shaved like Natalie Dormer did that one time, and there’s a tattoo on the inside of her wrist that Darcy doesn’t recognize, but she smells the same, like green apples and toothpaste and the latex gloves she carries everywhere. Karen gets up to make coffee (Santino pokes his head out of his nest of hoodie and 3DS to usher Karen around his kitchen) and Foggy eyes Claire with the same look that he gives poisonous snakes and/or foodstuffs he can’t quite understand, because he always eyes people he doesn’t know that cuddle Darcy that way. Claire just stares back at him, and then hooks her chin over Darcy’s shoulder and turns the TV to _Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arc,_ as if she’s daring for Foggy to contradict her movie choices in her own apartment. It’s probably the best thing she could have done, since _Raiders of the Lost Arc_ is basically Foggy’s favorite movie ever, which means Claire Temple has won his heart without even trying. It’s kind of awesome.

They’re still all sitting like that, piled together onto the creaky sofa with Santino sitting at Claire’s feet, Karen’s computer open on her lap, when Karen’s phone rings. Everyone goes still, Foggy on her right, Claire on her left, Karen on the other side of Foggy with her hand linked with Darcy’s good one on Foggy’s knee, all of them tangled together in a squashed unit that makes sense, that _makes sense_ , she’d never figured herself to be such a pack animal until this very moment but this is actually the fucking best. They all freeze, even Santino, who’s only half paying attention. Karen lets go of Darcy’s hand, swipes her phone open. “Hello?”

There’s a burble of noise on the other end. Then there’s a soft tap at the window. It’s Karen who gets up to let him in, Karen who helps him through. He’s still standing, and there’s not a lot of blood, so that means he’s okay. Darcy pulls herself up out of the tangle and over the top of the couch and throws herself into him, pressing her face into his throat and squeezing him so tight that her arms hurt, not crying, just breathing, reminding herself— _alive. Mine._ Matt smells like gunpowder and engine oil and metal and something else she doesn’t recognize, and she’s not going to cry again, she’s _not_ , but Matt actually picks her up so she can tug his mask off and press her cheek to his, just breathe him, and she knows for a fact that Foggy and Santino are staring at them (and probably Claire too, now that she thinks about it) but she doesn’t care right now, she doesn’t _care_. Her blood is thrumming. _Mine, mine, mine._ And she’s not like Fisk for thinking that. She’s not. She’s _not._

“You’re okay?” Her toes hit the floor again. His fingers trace the vertebrae on her spine, the edge of her ear, the line of her shoulders. “I went to the apartment and I found the phone, I went looking but I couldn’t find you, it rained and the trail was too thin, you kept going in circles—”

“I’m okay.” It’s not a lie, technically. She’s scared shitless and she’s going to sleep-scream and she’s probably going to cry for days, but she’s alive, and that means she’s okay, right? There’s a cut on his jaw that looks like a crease from a bullet. “I’m okay.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Foggy mouthing something to Karen. She thinks it’s _when did this happen?_ This sort of thing that they’re doing, the touching, it’s not something—not technically anything they haven’t done before while Foggy was around, like when Darcy was in the hospital or when they sit too close together at the office or what have you—but Foggy still looks suspicious. Her heart hurts. Darcy steps back just enough that she can’t feel his breathing any longer, and makes a mental note to get Foggy alone as soon as possible. Matt keeps one hand pressed to the space between her shoulder blades, the same place a doctor touches with their stethoscope. _Breath and beating hearts._  

“Kate and Ben are all right?” Karen asks. Claire heads into the kitchen and rattles some pans around, as if she’s trying to find something to do. “They’re somewhere safe?”

“Ben’s not happy. One of the men Fisk sent managed to clip him across the chest. He’s okay, just a surface wound, but it bled a lot. He was sleeping by the time I left. Kate fought Fisk’s men off, though.” Darcy closes her eyes. She just wants to curl up and let Matt touch her until she knows he’s all right, until she stops shaking, but she can’t do that right now. Not with Claire here, not with Foggy. She _can’t._ So she curls up in the corner of the couch instead.“He’s in one of Kate’s dad’s properties for the moment. Key-carded, privately owned, secure enough for now. Should be fine until—until this is done.”

“And how long is that gonna take?” Claire asks from the kitchen. “Actually, y’know, since my apartment has turned into a safe-house for vigilantes and _possibly_ fugitives from the law—”

Karen catches Darcy’s shoulder in one hand and squeezes hard.

“—I’d kind of appreciate hearing the whole story. From start to end. Well, starting from when I left, and ending in, you know. Now.”

“And me,” says Santino, and Claire drops her pan back into the sink to hustle him out of the apartment. There’s a burst of furious Spanish from the door ( _trae rollos de canela en la mañana y te diré, de acuerdo, pero dile algo a tu madre y eres hombre muerto_ ) and then Claire’s back, hooking her hair out of her face to knot it in a messy bun at the top of her head. She sits down on the couch on Darcy’s other side, grabbing a pillow and tucking herself around it. The tattoo on the inside of her wrist looks like a dragon eating its own tail. “So, yeah,” she says. “Story?”

“Everyone’s gone insane, and I’m trying to keep them from breaking too many laws,” says Foggy. At the same time, Karen says, “Apparently we’re all going vigilante;” Darcy says, “I’m really sick of people trying to kill me;” and Matt’s silence speaks louder than anything else. Claire’s eyes narrow. She looks at Karen.

“You,” she says. “You explain, because you’re unbiased.”

“That is like…the least accurate statement ever,” says Foggy, but Darcy pinches him in the ribs and Foggy shuts up.

It doesn’t take as long as Darcy expects it to, for Karen to go over (in neat, economical statements) the entirety of what’s happened since Claire left for Albany, aside from the death of James Wesley and Karen’s shattering in the office. They go over Kate, Ben, Mrs. Vistain; the yakuza, CC, the triad, the drugs; Lynch, Jenson, Andromeda Fares. Matt throws in a little bit about the triad warehouse, the woman with the cane, the blinded couriers in an empty line. Darcy mutters something about Fisk, and goes more into depth on Tandy, Ty, Lynch and Lilith. Claire just listens, and when nobody can think of anything else to explain, she uncurls from the couch and says, “Booze.”

“Oh, god, you are my new favorite,” says Foggy, and gets up to help her. He gives Matt a considering look as he nudges himself past. Matt lets his mask hang in his hands, still standing near the window as if he’d like nothing better than to bolt back out into the night, away from this little circle of allies and discussion and humanity in the face of everything that’s happened. She’s never realized how much he’s started to _express_ with her, how much his face moves, until she looks at him now and sees how very shut down he is. Darcy reaches out to him wordlessly, and when he comes closer, she draws him into it. He touches her hair, and says nothing.

“So, about—about Fisk,” says Foggy, once Claire’s set him up with a (startlingly huge) shot glass of something that smells like brandy. “If Fisk attacked Darcy—”

Matt’s hands squeeze hard enough to make his gloves creak, and then loosen.

“—doesn’t that mean we can, you know, bring charges? Get the word out?”

“He’d say I was lying,” Darcy rasps. She’s been talking too much. She can barely hear herself. “He’d say—he’d have an excuse. He owns everything, Foggy. We can’t—we can’t go up against a guy who owns everything. Not like this.”

“Not everything,” someone says from the fire escape. The first thing they see is dark hair. Then the light catches on purple streaks, on a purple hoodie, and Kate clambers through too. There’s a bandage on her forearm and a raw bruise on her cheek, but she’s alive, and there’s a fresh bow and a full quiver of arrows hanging over her shoulder. “I bought a building today. First time I used my granddad’s inheritance for something, actually. Your other case can move back into her apartment again whenever, and I’m going to hire construction crews to fix the whole fucking place. Also, you look like shit, Lewis. And I say that when _I_ was the one rolling in an alleyway in the past hour.”

Claire opens her mouth, and then closes it again. Foggy chokes. Matt just sighs, as if he’s been dealing with this for forever. And Karen makes the strangest squeaking sound in the back of her throat, almost a chirp, before she turns her face away. Nobody says anything for a moment.

“What?” says Kate. “

“You asshole,” Darcy shouts at her, though shouting is more like a whisper for her right now. She pulls away from the couch and flies at Kate. She’s not sure what she’s going to do until she realizes her fist is clenched, and aiming for Kate’s jaw. Kate catches her wrist before she can land the hit, shaking her arm a little. “You _fucking asshole._ ”

“You know it,” says Kate. “Your masked buddy’s kind of boss. He threw a Coca-Cola can and beaned a cop in the face. While sitting on top of Ben’s car, while I was driving it. It was _amazing._ I hope to god Ben caught it on video, because I want to Vine that shit. It was completely badass.”

“No,” says Matt.

“Matthew Michael Murdock,” says Foggy, “if there is videographic evidence of your secret badassery, then we are totally keeping it.”

“ _No_ ,” Matt says again, sharper this time, but nobody pays attention.

“You _asshole,_ ” Darcy says again, because the idea of Matt sitting on top of a moving vehicle and throwing soda cans at cops is not the weirdest thing to have happened to her tonight. “You douchebag dickface shithead fucknugget _asshole,_ Kate Bishop!”

“I love you too,” says Kate, and wraps her arms around Darcy. Her squishy hoodie smells like cinnamon, and she still gives some of the best hugs Darcy’s ever had. She hiccups and punches Kate twice in the shoulder, not hard, just enough to sting, before Kate pulls back and sniffs, like she’s trying to clear her nose of dust. “You smell like shit, too. Take a shower before you hurt yourself.”

“Bitch,” Darcy tells her.

“Jerk,” Kate replies, her lips twitching.

“I thought she stayed with Ben,” says Karen, her voice high-pitched and crackling. Claire’s lips are twitching like she’s holding back hysterical giggles.

“That was the original plan,” says Matt darkly. Darcy realizes, then, that he’s standing there maskless with Kate Bishop looking him in the face, and she wonders when the hell he started trusting people enough to just drop his identity in their laps. That, or when Kate Bishop used her (not inconsiderable) brainpower to put it together that the guy who wore a mask that covered his eyes was actually a blind lawyer. (Because look at it in the right light and it all comes together, just tilt the circumstance at an angle and all the pieces fit, and it still scares the living Christ out of her that Fisk might work it out before this is over.) “You’re late.”

“I had to go back home and let Yoko know everything was okay. Plus I used all my arrows tonight. I’m not about to go around unarmed.” She rolls her eyes. “I didn’t tell anyone I was coming here, before you crap yourself. I had a taxi drop me like…two blocks away and came through the alleys. Don’t worry, you don’t have to yell at me again.”

“I’m supposed to be the one yelling at her,” Darcy says to Matt. “I have yelling rights.”

“We had a discussion as to what she should and should not be doing immediately following an assassination attempt,” says Matt. “I don’t call that yelling.”

“You shouted at me for like twenty minutes about my bad driving, which, fuck you, my driving is awesome. And then I said I’d follow him unless he knocked me out and tied me up, so here we are.”

“It was a short-lived argument, then,” says Foggy.

Karen chokes again.

“Yup.” Kate pushes Darcy away to go and investigate some of the photographs Claire has hanging on the walls. “Which I won.”

“You did not _win the argument._ There wasn’t even an argument.”

“Tomato, tomahto.”

“My life,” says Claire, “is _fucking insane._ When did I start running a hotel for vigilantes?”

“Technically _they’re_ the vigilantes,” says Kate, pointing at Darcy and Matt. “ _I_ just shoot people. Very rarely. What are you drinking?”

“No.” Foggy’s nose wrinkles. “You’re like…ten.”

Kate rolls her eyes so hard that Darcy’s scared they might fall out of her skull. “Please, someone, save me from good samaritans. My brain is melting, my arm hurts, I had to tie a reporter to the bed to make sure he didn’t follow me out the secret elevator, and I ran four red lights and dodged three police cruisers in order to get away from Fisk’s goons. _I need booze._ ”

Claire flings her hands in the air, and scoots Kate into the kitchen to pick her poison.  

“Well, okay,” says Foggy. “That apparently happened.”

Darcy wishes she had Fred or Velma with her, because the noise level in this room is getting to be kind of insane. She squeezes her eyes shut, and lets herself slip back into the corner, to the open window. When she scoots out onto the fire escape, she’s not sure that anybody really notices. She can hear Claire and Karen and Kate talking, and through the window she sees Foggy and Matt dancing around each other again, and she’d be delighted normally ( _they’re my boys, I want them okay again_ ) but she’s just—she’s tired, and her throat hurts, and her eyes hurt, and they’re going to have to talk about what happens now that Kate knows (because Kate knows now?). She wants to sleep, too, but she also doesn’t, really, because that means nightmares, and _where_ she’s going to sleep, where any of them are going to sleep, that’s a whole new question, not to mention what they’re going to do afterwards, and she can’t _handle_ this. Not tonight. She rests her forehead against the bars of the fire escape and just breathes for a minute or two. Claire’s alleyway smells like cat pee and rotting newspapers, but at least it’s more normal than—than sociopaths in Matt’s living room and hands around her throat and thin, sad veterans with degrees in Jewish religious studies.

She can’t handle this tonight. Tonight she needs home and her own pillow and maybe Darla and Jen curling up with her and Matt’s heartbeat under her ear, because _that’s_ home, all of it, not Claire’s apartment. But Fisk knows that place, now, and she can’t go back without him finding her. _Why did I even come here?_ She must have been thinking about someplace Fisk wouldn’t think to look, some safe haven that he doesn’t know she has. And Fisk doesn’t know about Claire, at least, not in detail. If he did, he’d have come after her a long time ago. She must have remembered that, in her fog. She must have, otherwise she wouldn’t have used her key to get in. _I need to water Claire’s plants._ Claire’s back now, but still.

She hears a lighter flick somewhere close by, smells cigarette smoke, and nearly flinches, but it’s only some waiter at the end of the block lighting up at the end of his shift.

 _We’re monsters,_ she thinks again. _We’re monsters, but he’s evil._ She holds it close to herself, pressing her hand to her heart. She wants her cast off, wants her splits off and her stitches gone. There’s blood on the bandage again. She might need to have Claire re-stitch it. _I’m not like Fisk. I’m not._

It feels hollow, because she wants Fisk dead. She wants him dead for Elena, and she wants him dead for Kate and for the Goodmans and for Matt and for Claire. She wants him dead for what Wesley did to her, for the look on his face when she’d been standing between him and Matt, blood on the floor and his hands curled into fists. She wants him dead for a million reasons, and she wants to be the one to do it, to drive a knife into him over and over until there’s nothing left but pulp. But she’s not him, she’s _not_ him, and she doesn’t—she’s a fucking lawyer, she should want something better than this, she should want something _more_ than just the mindless violence she’s carried inside her since Eli died. She wants—she wants to _save_ people, not murder them. She’s more than that. She has to be more than that. She has to be more than Fisk.

_I wish I had been the one to do it, but no. I didn’t kill James Wesley. And I don’t know who was._

_I hope someone kills you_. _I hope it’s long, and painful. I hope you suffer. I hope I get to watch._

_I thought about burning his house down. I thought about cutting his brake-lines. I thought about beating him with a baseball bat. I thought about sneaking into his house, poisoning him. I thought about a gun. I thought about cutting his throat while he slept. I thought about shoving him in the way of an oncoming car._

_He killed his own father when he was twelve years old._

There’s a knife in her sleeve and a doorknob in her hand and she can see the light going on in the upstairs bedroom, flickering, flickering—

Something clangs. Darcy jumps so badly that she rams her knee into the bars, and Foggy (Foggy?) swears under his breath, flapping his hand. “Fucking windowsill,” he tells her, and scrabbles out onto the fire escape with something less than grace. “The damn thing bit me.”

“Stop talking about my shit like that, Nelson,” says Claire from inside, but then the conversation fades into static again. Darcy eyes him, pressing her forehead to the bars. Foggy pushes his hair back out of his face and tugs at the window once or twice, so it’s a little more than halfway closed. She shouldn’t feel trapped, but she does, just a little. _I can climb the ladder,_ she tells herself. _Or jump off the edge._ Which will probably break her legs, but whatever, it’s an escape. Then she looks at Foggy again, and swears at herself for being so fucking stupid. Because this is _Foggy._

“You okay?” he says. “You kinda checked out like an hour ago.”

She’s been out here an hour? She hadn’t noticed. Darcy looks at her hands again. “What do you think?”

“Right. Dumb question.” Foggy curls around so his knees are pressed up awkwardly against his chest, resting his temple against the metal bars. “I should learn to ask better questions when it comes to victims of attempted murder.”

“Yeah, well, he also apparently tried to kill Kate and Ben, and Kate’s okay.” Kate’s fucking thriving. If she’d known it would take an attempted murder to get Kate Bishop to smile like that, she’d have tried to throw an anvil at her head like…three weeks ago. “I’m fine.”

“That is such bullshit.”

She doesn’t say anything. Darcy knocks her head against the metal.

Foggy closes his eyes, and rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb. “They’re talking about plans, inside. What we’re going to do. Matt’s twitchy. Karen’s twitchy. Kate’s on a fucking rollercoaster of panic and mania, which we should probably get checked. Actually I’m somewhat scared of Claire, because seriously, she’s not normal, how does a normal person accept this sort of stuff happening without, like, freaking out—”

“Foggy.”

“Yeah, I know.” He points at himself. “Normal person. Freaking out. Which is—super unhelpful for you, right now, but I’m just. Argh.” Foggy musses his hands through his hair. “This is all so messed up.”

It’s probably the mildest description of their lives right now. She just shrugs, and knocks her head against the fire escape again.

“I’m not helping,” Foggy says. “You know, it’s weird, because—all through high school, people would just…tell me shit. Like, ‘hey, Nelson, guess what, I’m not straight, I’m actually gray-ace panromantic, but don’t tell anyone,’ or, ‘Foggy, my parents are getting divorced, mind if I crash on your couch for a week or so,’ or ‘actually my boyfriend kicks the shit out of me and I need somewhere to go, do you know a place’—that last one was my sister, in case you’re interested, _not_ a good year—but like…the past month or so I’ve realized that I’m the person no one talks to anymore. And I don’t know if I’m offended because it’s such a reversal or because you guys don’t trust me enough or because it’s just—how fucked up our lives have become, that the sort of stuff that people used to rant about to me is like…a one on the Richter scale that is our existence. And I’m not saying this to—to download it onto you, or anything, Christ, that’s like…the last thing you need right now, but I guess—I guess I wanted to say that you can still talk to me. If you need someone to talk to that isn’t—that isn’t Karen or Kate or Matt or this Claire woman I’ve never heard of until, like…two days ago, you can talk to me. Okay?”

She can’t cry anymore. Her eyes burn anyway. Darcy sighs, and tips over to knock her shoulder into Foggy’s knees. He scoots around until she can curl up against his side, because she just needs humanity right now, and she needs to remember that she’s real, and Foggy’s here, and she loves him, and _Christ._ “I know,” she says, and Foggy’s breathing hitches weirdly, like he’d been expecting something else. “I know, Foggy.”

“You don’t have to worry about me leaving,” he tells her. Ripples spread through her head where the words land. “Apparently I’m—getting better at being okay with the whole breaking-the-law thing.”

“Bagel Brigade.”

“Kate says we’re the Batfamily, because quote, _I’m a motherfucking millionaire, it totally works_ , unquote.” His eyes glance off her throat, flesh on a hot stove. “I think that’s what they’re talking about in there, who everyone is.”

“Even Matt?”

“Matt’s—Matt’s sitting and observing. I think something happened, but he won’t talk about it. You know how he is about that shit.” Foggy’s hand tightens on her shoulder. “And you don’t have to be anyone’s cushion tonight, okay? Just—just take care of yourself right now.”

“I’m okay, Foggy, seriously—”

“I’ve never seen you cry like that, Darcy. You get at least an hour of quiet time. Okay? Just—just sit.”

 _But Matt,_ she thinks. Because if she has to argue with him again about what she can do because of this, she’s going to scream. Because she loves him, and she wants him out here, with them, the way it used to be, but whatever tentative peace he and Foggy have forged, it’s too fragile for something like that. She taps her fingernails against the metal, wondering if Matt’s listening. Darcy only realizes she’s scratching out an SOS when Foggy rocks his head a little and says, “Maybe only half an hour, since my ass is going to freeze off. It’s fucking cold out here.”

“Pansy,” Darcy says. She looks up at the low, yellow clouds hanging over the Kitchen. “I think me and Matt are a thing, now. Is that weird?”

“No,” says Foggy. “Because I’m pretty sure you guys have been a thing since we were eighteen and neither of you were aware of it.” He gets a shifty look. “Wait, when did it happen?”

“Same day you, uh. Same day you guys argued.”

“ _Shit_ ,” says Foggy. “I owe Karen money.”

And _that’s_ a statement she’s not going to touch with a ten foot pole. “It really doesn’t bother you?”

“Christ, Darcy, no. No, it doesn’t bother me.” His lips purse. “I’m going to give Matt shit for not telling me about it, because that is against the bro code—”

“Jesus Christ, you are _not_ Barney what’s-his-face from _How I Met Your Mother_ , don’t let those words ever pass your lips again—”

“—and I’m gonna give _you_ shit for deciding to go out with that asshat—or, you know, whatever it is you two end up doing, because I get the feeling you’re gonna be cracking names and taking skulls more often than…whatever, but, you know, no. It’s not something that’d bother me. If you guys kind of, you know, diffuse the tension a little bit, maybe it’d not be so awkward to walk into your office without knocking anymore.”

For the life of her she can’t recall a single instance of having tension in a room when Foggy came in without knocking, but maybe she’s immune to it at this point. “Whatever. Like you’re not pining after Karen like a dink.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Foggy, you called her Chewbacca. You don’t make Star Wars references unless you really, _really_ like the girl.” She tips her head up to look at him. “You know I know that, don’t even try to bullshit me.”

“Well, you sound normal. Like a you that’s smoked for like…thirty years. But normal.” He sighs. “Whatever. That is a secret you will tell no one. On pain of—immense pain.”

“You can say death, I’m not gonna cry or anything.” She closes her eyes. “I’m just kinda—I don’t have a brain anymore. That’s all.”

“You totally have a brain.” Foggy shifts his arm around so she can lean on his ribs, instead of his shoulder. She can feel bandages under his clothes, still, from the glass and the bomb and the everything. “You’re just kind of running on way past empty and more like…negative one-thousand. Which means you’re gonna go to sleep, okay?”

“I’ll wake up,” she tells him. “I’ll have nightmares.”

“Fine,” Foggy replies. “We’ll watch you. Just like we did with Karen. If you do have nightmares, you’re not going to wake up alone.”

That aches, somewhere inside. “Okay,” she says, and closes her eyes. She snaps awake for a moment when someone picks her up (Matt, she knows the smell of him, knows the way his hands feel on her shoulders) and then falls back to sleep without another twitch.

And when she wakes up screaming an hour later (because Fisk is chasing her, Fisk is in her mind, in her head, in her bones) there’s Matt on one side, and Foggy on the other, and Claire’s standing watch over them all, her eyes open and unblinking in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation: 
> 
> "Bring back cinnamon buns in the morning and I’ll tell you, okay, but say anything to your mother and you are a dead man."
> 
> And we have Claire! I've been missing her. She takes no shit. 
> 
> I know a lot of fics describe Darcy's eyes as blue, but if you look closely at a picture of Kat Dennings, you can see that her eyes are green, instead. Which is interesting, especially in Tasertrick fics, because Tom Hiddleston's eyes are blue and Kat's are green. (So really, every Tasertrick fic is kind of wrong, but I love them anyway because yes please Tasertrick.)
> 
> For those interested in timeline, Matt (because he does hardcore parkour; yes, I know how far away Battery Park is from Chelsea, they're superheroes, okay) reached the warehouse around the same time Darcy finally managed to catch a cab, which is why he didn't call her sooner. He presumed (as you do, in the city) that sometimes when you're out at ass o'clock at night, it's a pain in the ass to catch a fucking cab.
> 
> (What, I'm TOTALLY NOT speaking from experience.)
> 
> (Fucking cab drivers.)
> 
> Reminder that the Francis-being-Owlsley's-spy thing was mentioned a few chapters ago in the first Leland POV, when he goes to meet Gao at the Museum of Natural History. 
> 
> Vanessa's actress is Israeli (remember her accent?) so I headcanon Vanessa as born of an American father and an Israeli mother, raised in Tel Aviv. She's of Muslim heritage and not Jewish, though.


	21. Devil's Own Luck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Jen and Elena are probably exactly where you think they are. 
> 
> Aaaaaand we're back to devil puns in chapter titles! I missed those. 
> 
> Now we get into possibly my least-favorite part of the entire series, which is the Hoffman debacle. Yes, it makes sense, but like...blagh. I wanted Hoffman to go away. So meh.
> 
> I'm about 10k into the next chapter, halfway through, and hopefully I'll have it finished by the end of the night tonight or the end of the day tomorrow. And then epilogue, and then done. And I will die quietly from exhaustion. 
> 
> Trigger warnings for: sexual manipulation, misogyny, misogynist slurs, racist mentalities, mentions of rape, violence, and gratuitous Disney references.

They stay in Claire’s house for two days. Well, Darcy and Karen do. Foggy slips in and out sometimes, because he’s the least likely of any of them to be traced, and they have shit to get done. “You know, bribing good cops,” he says, “talking to Elena. Keeping Jen from going stir-crazy, because wherever she is, there’s an enormous dickbag nagging her all the time. So yeah. Good-guy stuff.”

Matt usually goes with him—Matt Murdock isn’t on Fisk’s radar either, after all, even with all his bruises. Kate appears seemingly at random, doing her own thing. Darcy’s not sure whether she’s sneaking back to the Bishop property she has Ben Urich holed up in, or luring drug dealers into selling her shit so she can get them on tape, or torturing Robbie Goodman, or something else entirely, but she never leaves Claire’s apartment without at least three knives on her person, and she always brings back doughnuts, so Darcy’s not about to lecture her about it. (Even if half the time she’s awake at night it’s because she’s so worried, because Matt and Foggy and Karen and Kate are still in so much danger, if Fisk finds out, if Fisk learns about it, if—)

(Kate has Ben’s wife Doris moved to a nursing home upstate, under a false name. Money can do everything. Ben calls Karen about it, and Karen locks herself in the bathroom for an hour to talk in private. When she comes out, her eyes are red, but there’s a smile on her face, so Darcy thinks they’ve mended fences.)

Claire goes to work, on and off. She mostly has morning shifts, five to three, so when Darcy wakes up at three in the morning with nightmares, she’s already awake and making coffee. “Heard you’re doing this disguise thing now, too,” she says the second morning, when Darcy creeps out of the bedroom (it’s like middle school, tiptoeing between all the sleeping bodies, even with Kate gone most of the time). “Santino told me. Calling yourself Lilith.”

“Yeah.” Darcy heaves herself up onto the bar stool. “You mad?”

“Nah.” Claire slides a mug of coffee across the counter, as if she’s been waiting for Darcy to get up, as if she’d known that the nightmares would shake her awake. “I’m starting to figure out that I’m like…catnip for superheroes. It’s kind of interesting.”

“That is not how I would describe you.”

“Whatever, Lewis.” Claire pushes half-and-half at her. “I can’t—I can’t do what you guys do, not really. I told you before, it’s…it’s a disconnect between what I am, and what you are. Fixer, breaker. But if you ever need a place, or a person, or a stitch job in a back alley, you call me.” Her eyes narrow, until Darcy feels like she’s pinned to her seat. “You understand me? You _call_ me. No ifs, no ands, no buts. And if I ever get my ass in trouble again, I promise I’ll call you two first. Deal?”

She doesn’t cry. Darcy smiles, a little wobbly, and nods. “Deal.”

“Plus, y’know, if you ever need a drinking buddy, well, I can do that, too.”

They look at each other for a moment. Then Claire comes around the counter and wraps her arms around Darcy again, resting her cheek against Darcy’s hair. Darcy squeezes her hard enough to hurt. “Seriously, best drinking buddy.”

“Whatever,” says Claire again. “You just mooch.”

“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Commissioner.”

Claire laughs. “That’s who I am? Commissioner Gordon? Thought Foggy said I was Alfred.”

“You’re on the lawful good side of things,” Darcy says. “Besides, you're too peripheral to be Alfred. You help when we need you to, but otherwise you stay out of it. You know? Also! Sergeant-major face.”

“Says you.” She pinches the back of Darcy’s wrist. “Give me the half-and-half back, I only have so much.”

Santino lurks, most of the time. She’s pretty sure that he should be in school, but he claims that he's taking online classes. Considering what Claire’s told her about Santino's life, and about his mother, she thinks it’s more likely that he’s teaching himself. He brings textbooks sometimes and works at Claire’s table, his headphones over his ears. It makes it impossible to really talk about what they’re going to do, even if Santino’s music is loud enough to deafen him. Santino’s not a part of this, not like Kate is, and it feels dangerous to talk near him. Even if he’s strangely enthusiastic about this whole “vigilantes are in Claire’s apartment” thing. Whatever the Russians did to him, it makes him twitchy and jumpy and flinch at the slightest noise, but at the same time, he’s a wriggly, happy puppy when he gets a chance to ask them questions.

“How’d you get your powers?”

“An accident,” says Matt. He hasn’t stopped clenching his hands into fists since he heard the words _Fisk tried to kill Darcy_ , an endless cycle that pinches at her ribs and squeezes her throat. “Don’t really want to talk about it.”

“And you guys just met randomly?”

“I mean, to be fair, this didn’t start until like…a few weeks ago,” says Darcy, but she nearly spills her coffee as she says it.

“And you’re protecting the Kitchen? Not like—not like the Avengers, they do the big stuff, but—but you help people like us. The ones that don’t matter.”

“Everyone matters,” says Matt, and then he slips out onto the fire escape, because that, that right there—that made her want to cry.

“Are you gonna get powers too?”

“No idea,” says Darcy. “Not gonna lie, some pyrokinesis would be really appreciated at this point.”

 _What’s your origin story_? is the one that she can’t answer, because she has a feeling that this, this moment, right here: this is her origin story.

Matt’s avoiding her. She wonders, for the first time, what it’s like to sit close to someone who’s been injured when you have senses like Matt’s. Does he hear the pop of her healing rib? How her broken fingers scrape against each other like pebbles? Can he hear the way her lungs rattle, sometimes, or how she has to clench her hand to keep from wincing when she swallows too hard? It’s hard enough for her to see how Karen jumps when fireworks go off in the alleyway, or how Kate’s mouth twists when she reaches too far with her bandaged arm. If she could hear all that, _see_ all that, she’d avoid her, too.

(But she _needs him there_ , the stupid soft underbelly of her heart whines at her, she needs to know he’s okay, she needs him to know _she’s_ okay, as okay as she can be when she aches all over and she’s scared to death that they’re all going to be hurt again, that this could somehow get worse, that one of them—maybe all of them—could wind up dying, and she _needs_ him—)

It’s at about five am on the second morning (an hour after Claire’s left, twenty minutes after Karen snaps awake panting and heaving on the floor, and thirty seconds after she hears the tap of shoes on the fire escape that means Matt’s returned from whatever nightly rounds he’s been making lately) that they’re finally in a place where Matt can’t run from her, and Darcy fucking _pounces._

“You told Kate.”

Only partway through the window, Matt stops. He turns his face towards her, as if he’s peering. She wonders if he’s smelling the tears or hearing the way her heart is pounding or if he’s picking up something else she can’t even begin to imagine. Then he licks his lips. “I was worried,” he says. “I was—worried about you. She guessed. She—she notices a lot she doesn’t say.”

That sounds like Kate. Darcy watches him, and Matt watches her too, for a moment, before closing the window behind him (it’s cold). He doesn’t run, or even walk very fast, but he seems to vanish from one side of the room and appear on the other without even moving, and she never would have been able to anticipate how much that fucking hurts. 

“You can’t hide from me forever, y’know,” she tells him. Matt, already three-quarters of the way out of the room, freezes like she has a gun trained on his back. Foggy’s asleep on the floor, still, and Karen—she’s not quite sure if Karen’s crying or in the shower or both. She thinks from the twist to Matt’s jaw that it’s probably both. She can’t hear it, though. “It’s not—it’s not fair for you to do that. Especially at a time like this.”

Matt pulls his gloves off, and leaves them on one of the armchairs. (Foggy, bless him, has brought the Hufflepuff blanket to Claire’s apartment. It’s a splash of vivid color on Claire’s black furniture.) “I’m not hiding from you.”

“You’re doing a damn good job at avoiding me, then, because I don’t think I’ve actually had a chance to talk to you since—since Melvin. And considering everything, that’s kind of fucked up.”

Her voice cracks on the last few words, not because she’s going to cry—she’s not—but because her throat still just _hurts._ Matt makes an abortive movement, reaching out and pulling back in one, and tugs his mask off, too.

“And if you’re avoiding me because of what happened with Fisk, I don’t know—I don’t know if I’m going to punch you in the face or in the balls, because for fuck’s sake, Matt. I escaped, I made it out alive, and neither one of us would have been able to guess that he’d be there. Neither of us,” she says again, louder this time, because he looks like he’s going to argue with her. “Yeah, you know what, we should have prepped better, we should have—we should have _thought,_ should have followed the rules like we were supposed to, no one goes anywhere alone, but we didn’t _know._ We didn’t have any reason to think that he’d be coming after me and not—not Karen, or even Kate, Jesus, he had just as much reason to think it was Kate considering all the shit she’s been pulling lately. So _do not even start with me._ ”

“You nearly died,” Matt says, almost too quietly. “You nearly died, _again_.”

“Yeah, and that’s—that’s going to fucking happen. We talked about that. We _know_ that. It’ll happen over and over again, but I knew that going in. We both knew that, going in. It’s not something we can actually avoid.” She looks at him. “Please don’t do this. I know—I know you feel guilty for it, and I get it, okay, but don’t—don’t take it out on me.”

“It’s not—” He seems to be stumbling over himself. She can see him thinking it through, trains of thought racing through his head. _I can’t tell her, she won’t understand,_ first. Then, _but she understands the rest,_ because she _does_ , and she knows he knows it. And then: _we match. We match. We match._ She thinks he’s scared of scaring himself more than he is of scaring her, but she’s not entirely certain if he’s aware of that. “It’s not—guilt, exactly.”

“Then what is it?”

Matt makes a noise that she didn’t think could actually come from a human throat, something caught between man, animal, and demon. “I want him _dead.”_ In the shadows of the dawn, he’s half in the dark, half in the light, and she can’t help but feel that it’s disgustingly symbolic. “I found the broken pieces, in the apartment, the blood on the floor, and I wanted to kill him. I want to _kill_ him for what he did to you. I should have been there _to_ kill him, when it happened, instead of—instead of hearing about it through Claire, hearing that Santino had called to tell her that you were—that you were hysterical and that your throat looked like raw meat. I want him dead. And I want to—”

He breaks off. He’s actually shaking with the force of his rage. It’s almost like Fisk, feeling this anger in the air, licking at the world like a wildfire. But it’s not aimed at her. It’s not _meant_ for her. It’s at himself. _Reflections and inversions._ “I’m not supposed to want that,” he says, the words scraping away at him until there’s nothing left. “I’m not supposed to _want_ that.”

Because Matt is a good Catholic, and a good Catholic isn’t supposed to want to sink their thumbs into someone’s eye sockets and push until they reach brain. A good Catholic isn’t supposed to enjoy beating people bloody. She knows he enjoys it, she knows it, because she’s seen the calculation in it, the sheer efficacy of it. The purpose to his violence. She lets it roll over her, the _wrath_ in it, the fury, the frustration. “And if it were you,” she says, “if he’d tried to kill you, I’d want to kill him. I _do_ want to kill him.” He closes his eyes. She digs her nails into her palm. “How much do you hate me for that?”

“I can’t hate you for wanting the same things I do.”

“But you can hate yourself.”

“Yes,” says Matt. “I can hate myself.”

That, she understands.

“Father P told me that it’s not—it’s _human_ to want revenge. That it’s human to want things like this. It’s—the sticking point is whether or not you _do_ it. And I thought about it, and I decided he’s probably right. And you’re so—if you kill someone, even if it was for me, Matt, it might actually kill _you_. And I don’t want you dying for me.”

He shakes his head, not listening. “That’s not the point.”

“No, it is.” Her hair is sticking between her lips. “I’ve seen—you know, with—” _Karen_ “—with the people we helped at Day By Day, I saw it a lot. What killing does to—to good people. And you _are_ good, Matt. Even if you don’t think you are, you’re _good_. And killing someone, intentionally…it eats at you. It’s like an acid, it doesn’t—it doesn’t go away.” _It’s staining,_ Karen had said, _it’s everywhere, I can’t get the feel of the gun off my hands,_ and Karen doesn’t have that same self-hatred Matt does, the inferiority complex built into his very bones, Karen doesn’t have that, Karen doesn’t have (or didn’t have) that inborn self-loathing that drives Matt to confession, and if Karen is nightmarish then Matt would be a storm of blades, cutting himself to pieces, making it worse and worse and worse _—_ “Don’t—I don’t want you to die because of me. And if you’ll kill someone, it’ll kill you.”

“He deserves to die,” the devil says.

“I know he does,” Lilith replies. “But you’re not going to be the one to do it.”

“You can’t stop me.”

“I can try. It’ll kill you to do it, so I’ll damn well try.”

He shifts. “Darcy.”

“No.”

“He’s _evil._ ”

“And we’ll get him. But you’re not killing him.” _I will, if I can. If I get the chance._ She doesn’t know what she’ll become, but she wants it. She _wants_ it. “You’re not killing him.”

“There was a moment,” Matt says, “when—when Claire told me you were hurt. It was—I thought I’d reached the bottom of the pit, that night, with the drug runners, the—the _smell_ in the apartment, all the terror. I thought I’d found the worst of what humanity can do to itself, and then Claire called, and I realized— you can just keep digging _deeper_. Another circle of hell that Dante could never imagine. And there was a part of me, the devil in me, that told me to keep going. And if you were gone, if—if we lost any of them, I wouldn’t stop. I _wouldn’t_ stop. And it didn’t scare me. It was like I was supposed to be there. And the way it felt, the welcoming—” He licks his lips. “If I go through that door, let myself fall down, then I won’t get back up.”

She slips off the stool. He doesn’t flinch away when she sidles closer, when she perches on the edge of the couch. She wants to touch him, but she’s fairly sure he’ll bolt if she tries. So she doesn’t.

“You won’t,” she says.

“Won’t what? Won’t fall?” He laughs. “I’m fairly certain this is what falling feels like. Two days ago I walked into a warehouse full of men and women who’d blinded themselves, who’d given up their lives for a woman who—who turned them into _slaves._ I keep thinking I’ve found the darkest parts of the world, and then something else happens and it just gets—it gets murkier and murkier, and there’s no way out.”

“You won’t turn into that, Matt.”

“How do you know that?” Matt snaps, and _there_ he is, there’s Matt’s temper, the thing he’s been keeping leashed for days and days because he hates how it makes him feel, like he can’t control himself, like he’s not human anymore. But it’s surface temper, not the same rage. It’s safe temper. It’s all flaring coal. “You _don’t_ know that. You don’t know that I won’t. You say you do, but you don’t. You _don’t_.”

“I know that because I know you, Matt.” She reaches out with one hand, and then pulls back. “You told me, back when—after what happened with Lynch, you told me you _knew_ that I wouldn’t let the monster destroy me. Because you know me. And I believed you. And I _know—_ ” she steps forward, one, two, three, until they’re almost touching, until she can feel the warmth curling off him “—that you won’t become that. Because you, your—your core, or your soul, or whatever it is you want to call it—you’re _good_ , Matt. That’s why.”

He flinches. He actually flinches at that, and she wants to wrap around him and curl into him and just _be_ there, have him be there, but she needs to get this out. _Stop regretting past mistakes,_ Jen mutters in her head _. Just do better next time. Just move forward._ Darcy wraps her arms around herself instead. “You know that,” she says. “You know I wouldn’t lie to you. You know I _know_ you. You know I’m right.”

Matt jerks his head a little. It’s not a _no_. It’s just…it’s just movement for the sake of movement, trying to shake off the monster on his back, and for Matt, who keeps himself under such strict control, it says more than a Dostoevsky novel. “But what if you’re not?”

“I’m right, Matt. I’m always right. Remember? I’m always right about you. I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t still be here otherwise.”

His breathing catches in his throat.

“You’re not killing him, Matt,” she says. “You won’t. I know you. You wouldn’t. You _won’t._ ”

“Then neither are you,” he says. “Because you’re the same. You’re the same as me. That’s how you know. If—if you kill him, it would destroy you. You think it won’t, but—but the monster will eat you alive, and I can’t bear for that to happen to you.”

She wants to hiss. She nearly does. She swallows it back, because goddammit, he’s right. _Fucking shit._ “Then you know how I feel,” Darcy replies. “You know why I’m telling you no.”

_Because we make each other better. Because we hold each other back. Because we’re warped reflections in a looking glass. Because it’s us._

She’ll tell him this, over and over and over. She feels like she needs to. Because she hadn’t been lying, that night when she’d curled up next to him and let him breathe into her. Matt doesn’t scare her. The devil doesn’t scare her. The risk doesn’t scare her, not the way the thought of him leaving does. Because he’s her best friend, she’s in love with him, and Jesus Christ, she doesn’t know how many times she has to say it for him to _get it_.  

“No guilt,” she says. “You’re not allowed to feel guilty about not being there.”

“Darcy.”

“Are you gonna let me feel guilty for everything that happens to you?” she says, before he can open his mouth, before he can argue her to a standstill, because he’s such a fucking lawyer she wants to scream. ( _You’re the same way, you filthy hypocrite, he just knows not to argue with you by now._ ) “Are you—the next time you come in with a hole in your guts or a broken arm or whatever it is that’s going to happen to you because you don’t have _armor_ , are you going to let me feel guilty that I wasn’t there to rescue you? Because I’ll feel guilty. And we can go around and around in circles about this or you can just—you can _hear me_ , and listen, and say, you know what, no, there are things _neither_ of us can control, and yeah, it’s gonna be fucking terrible sometimes, but we just—we stand up. And we move forward.”

“You can’t move forward if you’re dead.”

“And you can’t move forward if _you’re_ dead!” In the bedroom, she hears Foggy muttering something, and lowers her voice, before it gives out. “Matt, we’re just—we can’t survive if we keep going in circles. _Please_. Please don’t—I just—I love you, okay? I don’t—I’m not good at saying it but I _do_ , and I need you to—to stay. With me. Please. Because—because you know me, you know the bad parts, and you don’t—you still think I’m _good_ , you still think I’m worth something, and I need that more than ever, now. And I don’t—I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to stop being in love with you. And I don’t want to. Even when you do shit like this, even when you try to push me away because of your _fucking_ complex, even when you hate yourself so much that it—it hurts me, I just—I can’t not love you. And I’m going to destroy _anybody_ who tries to take you away from me, because I don’t want to love anybody but you, not like this. Not ever again.”

Matt stills. It’s as if she’s stopped his heart, the suddenness of it. Then feeling bursts back into him again, in his face, how he’s standing. He opens, and it’s like watching the sun come up, seeing him without any of the masks, all of them dropping away. His eyes widen, his lips part, and he turns towards her as if he’s caught in a nightmare, but when he lifts his hands, almost in supplication, she bolts for him. Darcy crashes into his ribs (still broken, but he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t try to twist away) and digs her fingers into the back of his shirt, hiding her face in his throat. Matt bends into her and just holds on, knotting his fingers through her hair and breathing, like—like breathing her in is the only thing he can manage, right now, like it’ll save him, like it’ll save her. She can feel his heart against her ribs, thrumming like a bird caught between them, and she wants to catch it and keep it close, that fluttering hope, hold it between her hands. “We can’t let him hurt them,” she says, her throat burning. “We can’t let him keep doing this. We need to find something. We need to find _anything._ ”

“We,” Matt says, his voice faint but clear. He rubs her hair between his fingers, one hand still pressed close to the space between her shoulder blades. “I’ve been looking, but I haven’t—Fisk has gone to ground. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where _any_ of them are. I can’t find anything anywhere.”

“We’ll go back to the start,” she says. “Just like we always do. Back to the start. Find a new—a new path, a new chance, a new clue. We’ll find something _,_ Matt. He’s not going to get away with this. Not now, not ever. We’re going to stop him. We’ll stop him and the law will have him and it’ll be right. It won’t fix what he’s done, but—but then we can start repairing it all, Melvin and—and Karen and Kate and Elena and Claire. All of it. We’ll do it. We _will_.”

He nods once. She thinks, at first, he might just be dipping his head to press his mouth to the edge of her collar, because he does that, too. Then his hair brushes against her cheek. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” says Matt into her throat, and she thinks he might be crying, because there’s something hot and wet against her skin, smearing salt, “but the only thing I can ever pray for anymore is that I never stop doing it.”

She doesn’t know what to say. So all she can do is cling on, because she loves him so much, this man, and even if she doesn’t understand why he loves her, too, she’ll take it. She’ll keep it. Because this is _hers,_ and she’ll be damned if she lets Fisk take any of it away from her.

_We’ll get him. Because we have to._

.

.

.

_Two days before._

Leland knows he’s fucked the instant he gets the text from Tomas.

Hey, he’s an intelligent guy. And the Vanessa woman, working with Gao? That’s a match made in hell. He knows for a fact that if Gao and the Marianna woman are newfound besties, then Gao will have spun the assassination into some kind of sob story guaranteed to appeal to anyone with a vagina. Or estrogen. Or both. Whatever.

What it _means_ is that he can’t rely on throwing that story in Fisk’s face to distract him from the fact that Gao would have most certainly dragged his ass into it, because Gao can never do anything by halves. And if he’s getting a call from Fisk himself at ass o’clock in the morning to let him know that there’s an emergency meeting and could he please be at Confed. Global in three hours’ time, then he’d be too late to even try that anyway. Which, to be frank, is both completely unhelpful and pants-shittingly terrifying.

Also, apparently, the Vanessa woman has enough spine to shoot a man in the face without warning. So there’s that, too. God, Lee is going to _kill_ him for getting Francis’s skull spattered over carpet.

In the face of all of this insanity, Leland decides quickly. He’s gifted with that, quick decision-making, and he’s smart enough to make _good_ decisions, even if he’s flying by the seat of his pants. He texts George ( _move the package to the next safehouse, will join you in twenty minutes. DO NOT TAKE HIM ANYWHERE WITHOUT ME._ ) and then shoves his phone into his pocket. The master program for his number running is still processing in the background of his laptop, so he shifts the last of his slush fund candidates into place before turning the whole thing off. It’ll be a miracle if Fisk notices the discrepancies in the finances by the end of the week, let alone in the short window he’d need to in order to stop Leland Owlsley from getting the fuck out of Dodge, but he still makes sure to lock the program down before he closes it up. _The casino, Leland,_ he tells himself, as he slides his laptop into his briefcase, along with his papers, and zips the thing closed. _Should have just gone with the fucking casino. So much easier than all of this cloak-and-dagger shit._

And oh, come on, Leland. He knows he wouldn’t have ever gone with the casino. If he’d been set at a table, back when all this had started, and been given a choice— _Fisk, or casino_?—he would have gone with Fisk even knowing it would come down to this, because he’s always been so fucking bored. A casino wouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining as all of this shit has been, he can tell anyone that much. _Throwing out cheating weasels versus getting to tase a psycho in a black mask in a parking garage?_ He’ll take the taser, thank you. Though it was a bit more exciting, at the time, then his heart should probably have been handling.

Like he said. He’s not stupid. If a doctor tells you not to fuck around with your heart, _don’t fuck around with your heart._

He calls the private jet he keeps at JFK, or starts to. Then he remembers that that private jet was financed by Fisk, and dials the second one instead, the private airfield out in the ass-crack of New Jersey that he fucking hates visiting because all of the carpets are a terrible shade of puce. The pilot bitches at him for a minute or two before Leland flashes a metaphorical bill in his face. (Ten grand will get you a lot of anything if you ask nice.) Hoffman with the Feds and Leland himself on a nice cozy jet out to whatever island is the next over from Armand Tully’s; five by five by his standards.

The elevator doors open on the parking garage, and Leland fumbles his keys out of his pocket. His fingers are disgustingly sweaty; he needs to shower as soon as he gets on that jet. His car is one of the only ones left in the lot, aside from an Acura about six spaces down that he knows belongs to that hot secretary that Brent likes to bang on the sly. _Tells her he’ll pay for her girlfriend’s cancer treatments if she does it. Fucking cunning motherfucker._ Honestly, the days where you can goose a secretary are behind you, and he will always, always regret this. Fucking feminazis ruining everyone’s day. He hits the unlock button on his keys, and then slips into the front seat, tossing his suitcase into the passenger side.

“Hello, Leland,” says a voice, and Leland _shrieks_. He’s not ashamed to admit it. He nearly fucking pisses himself. Then he looks in the rear view mirror and he realizes that it’s just Gao, just that _fucking bitch_ Gao, and he sincerely considers dragging his taser out of his bag to shoot her in the tit, because Jesus fucking Christ—

“—fucking _warn people_ when you’re going to break into their goddamn cars!”

Gao just looks at him, her eyes reflecting light like mirrors. Then he realizes. “Christ. You speak fucking English now?”

“I could always speak English, Leland.” She says his name weird, _Lee-LANd,_ and it makes his skin crawl. “I simply found it amusing to watch you fumble with the translator.”

“You bitch,” says Leland, fuming. Then he remembers that Gao’s the cause of this whole mess, and his temper rises. “You _crazy bitch_. What the hell were you thinking, telling the Marianna woman about the benefit? Are you _insane_?”

“Ah,” says Gao. “So you did have more than one man on Vanessa Marianna. I’d wondered.”

“Do you think that I wasn’t going to put every guy I have on that woman as soon as she survived your goddamn poison? And do you have any idea how _complicated_ it was to get that done? I’m damn lucky that Fisk decided to make Francis head of the detail, because he could pick and choose who he wanted, but of course, now, Francis is _dead._ And isn’t that going to just be hell to explain to Lee.” He scowls. “What the hell are you even doing at this point? I wouldn’t be surprised if you fucking jury-rigged Marianna surviving the benefit, out of feminine solidarity or some goddamn thing. Were you getting lonely in your girls’ club, that you needed to drag a woman like Vanessa Marianna into all of this? I thought we agreed that she was—she was pushing it all off track, she was ruining everything—”

“Vanessa Marianna surviving the poison at the benefit was only a lucky coincidence,” says Gao. And of course the coincidence is _lucky_. He should have pegged this goddamn matriarch of the goddamn Triad as a feminist as soon as he laid eyes on her. But then she’d pulled that mystical mumbo-jumbo Chinese voodoo shit and he’d forgotten to double-check. _And now it’s biting you in the ass, Leland, well done._ “As for whether or not she was actually ruining the plan, Leland, I would say that you need to take a closer look at the woman herself before you make that judgment.”

“ _She fucks him up_ ,” Leland hisses. “He was—he was the _best_ person we could have used, you and me both, whatever the hell you’re in New York for, I guarantee you that he was going to be your best option, by _far_ —have you ever seen the Maggia? Jesus Christ, they have sticks so far up their asses that I’m surprised they don’t taste splinters. And she _ruins_ him. She turns him into this—this gigantic teddy bear with misdirected anger issues, instead of what we _need_ him to be. Which is, to be frank, an excellent scapegoat and a brilliant, deranged way of getting me more money than I could have possibly ever wanted. And I have wanted a _lot_ of money since the time I was six years old and eating fucking beans out of a can for the sixth month in a row.”

Gao’s eyebrows lift. “You sound bitter, Leland.”

“Damn straight I sound bitter. I had to move _everything_. All at once. I don’t like moving everything all at once. It’s too obvious, leaves too much of a paper trail. Do you have any idea how complex the programs I use are? The answer is very, before you say anything. Very, very complex. Complex enough that I jury-rigged most of them myself, and _I_ am the only one who can use them without them imploding. Dumping all that money in my slush fund in sixty seconds? That was an insult to the sheer level of intelligence and thought and hours of coffee-driven insanity that I have put into these programs, Gao. And that? That’s on _your_ damn head.”

“I will not apologize to your computer programs, Leland,” says Gao. “Nor to you.”

“Jesus Christ, does _no one_ have a brain anymore? Vanessa Marianna is _nothing_. You wanted her to _die_. You fucking _poisoned her_ and killed six other people to manage it. You actually nearly killed _me_ , goddammit, because you didn’t tell me that _all of the glasses would be poisoned._ ”

“It was elementary. There could not be a specific target.”

“Cut the crap, Sherlock. You wouldn’t have given a shit if I’d died, too. You betray everyone.”

“No,” says Gao. “I betray none of my allies. You, Leland, were never my ally. You were only ever a stepping stone.”

“You don’t fucking talk to me that way.”

“You have no idea what you are dealing with.” Gao produces a knife from up her sleeve, flicking it between her fingers. She doesn’t even seem to realize she’s doing it. “You are a vile, filthy little man who cannot see beyond the end of your own nose. You have no _vision_ , Leland. Your narrow focus on immediate gratification blinds you to the opportunities that have been presented through Vanessa Marianna and Wilson Fisk.”

“Put your kung fu hocus pocus away, Gao, it won’t work on me anymore.” The knife might, though. He doesn’t like knives. Even with special armor, knives make him uncomfortable.

“If you won’t listen, I have no cause to press you,” says Gao. She leans into his (custom, leather-covered, and soon-to-be-cleaned) backseat, crossing her arms low over her belly, twirling the blade over her fingers. “I am leaving this country. I have found more here than I expected, and less. I will leave it gladly, for there are many things that I’ve realized that I must reconsider. But know this, Leland: I know what you have done with Detective Hoffman. And more than that, I know exactly where he is, and where he will be going.”

His guts implode. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The man you stole after he did Wilson’s dirty work. Do you think you were subtle? I am not so stupid as you thought I was, Leland. I have been keeping an eye on him, and I have been keeping an eye on you. I’ve known where he was from the moment you grabbed him, that little property in the Kitchen that you think you have stowed away so neatly, so carefully managed in the forest of paperwork that you have ferreted all over the city. But I know who he is, I know the men that are with him, and more important than that, I know that in exactly ten minutes, he will be wrapped up in brown paper and delivered to Fisk in pieces if you do not do exactly what I say.”

Leland can feel sweat building on the back of his neck. “What do you want?”

Gao watches him for a long time. “You are going to take your paperwork, and your computer, and you are going to give it to Vanessa Marianna.”

“Bull-fucking-shit. I don’t owe that bitch a thing. And whatever—whatever she has on you to turn her into her fucking _lapdog_ , I hope to god you get rid of it, because Gao, that’s just sloppy.”

“You are right,” she says. “The organization is falling apart. Wilson destroyed it himself. We have no way of knowing if Vanessa Marianna was the catalyst or if it would have happened regardless, if his temper and his lack of control would have ruined us all anyway. But I have been thinking a great deal about the man in the mask—”

“—Christ, not this loser again—”

“Did you know he has a new partner?” she says, and Leland actually blinks. “The Lynch boy mentioned it, when I had my people visit him. There are many that I know who work in the courts. It is not difficult to have them report interesting things to me. And they told me of the man in the mask, the devil of Hell’s Kitchen, working with a woman with red hair and a black-and-white mask.”

“Mathias Lynch spends half his time high out of his mind on heroin and the other half boosting MGH to try and grow a bigger prick. What the fuck does that even have to do with anything?”

“Very little, from your point of view. But I am wiser than you,” she says, simply. It makes him grind his teeth. “I have had much time to think, since Marianna’s hospitalization, and I have realized that it is much better to have many on your side then to remain alone. Wilson, he has not learned balance yet. He has made mistakes, and soon he will pay for them. The mask will see to that. But he has someone on his side who will not leave him, no matter what. And that someone—she hides fire inside her.” Gao bares her teeth. “I have decided that it is safer, for me, for my people, that I will also be on that side. You have made your choice, Leland. You have picked the wrong side.”

“The side with a failing kingpin and his damsel in distress? What the hell have you been smoking? There is literally _nothing_ about that picture that is in any way tempting.” He eyes her phone. “Let me keep Hoffman. I need him.”

“You still think you have all the power, don’t you?” she says. “That this is a situation in which you have kept control, simply because you are an intelligent man who uses his intelligence for nasty things. You’ve never been more wrong, Leland. And now, you will learn that.”

The syringe pierces him not in the throat, but in the skin just to the right of his spine, a prick of pain that transforms into an odd, numb burning. He can’t quite get his tongue to work right. He doesn’t know where she drew it from, some pocket in her diaphanous uniform, or from the bun in her hair, but she draws it without him noticing and she stabs him in the neck, and she’s _smirking_ at him. She’s looking at him in triumph, this stupid old woman with her stupid naïve dreams, and it drives him crazy. “You bitch,” he slurs. “You fucking bitch.”

“I do not like you,” she says. “But I think—I think that if you survive, you might be quite useful.” Her lips crease up. “Your survival, however, is doubtful.”

He fades.

.

.

.

“Well,” says Jen, as Darcy fixes her red wig over her head, and fluffs the hair out over her shoulders. “You said when you f-first moved in that I might not feel safe eventually. We have reached that p-point.”

“Oh, god, Jen.” She looks at the phone. She’s put it on speaker, resting it on the back of Claire’s toilet as she puts on her face. The Lilith wig—she’s going to have to stop using it sooner or later, she doesn’t want to fuck with the Black Widow and if people keep mixing them up she might have a Russian assassin on her hands sooner than she thinks—and her make-up, her mask pressed cool against her skin. Her lips are red, her hair is red, her nails are red under the gloves, or they will be once she puts her gloves on. _Red, red, red._ It doesn’t feel like her color. “I’m so sorry. I know—I know how shitty this is, and I’m so sorry I dragged you into it—”

“D-Don’t even start.” Jen makes a _pbbbbt_ noise. “Elena loves it here. There are people she can mother and excellent kitchens. And it’s n-not as bad as I expected it to be, staying here. It’s just weird. Darla hates it, though. She won’t come out of the bathroom.”

“Poor kitty.” She rolls lipstick across her mouth. “Foggy said there’s a dickhead that’s been messing around with you.”

“D-Don’t get touchy. You don’t need to beat anyone up. He’s just a bored child who doesn’t know what to do with people who have their lives outside of his sphere of influence.” Darcy gets the feeling that said bored child is in the room, because there’s a fairly loud _hey_ from the other end of the line. “I can handle bored children. I d-dealt with you for ten years, remember? The d-distraction techniques are remarkably similar.”

“Decaf and Netflix?”

“Decaf and Netflix. Primarily _Mythbusthers._ ”

Darcy winces. She knows how much Jen hates _Mythbusters._ “We’re going to fix it, Jen.” She touches her pinky to the edge of her lip, wiping away a smear. Her bruises are finally starting to fade again, so even with the concealer, her face looks less lumpy than just…face-y. “Fisk—Fisk’s not going to touch you, or Elena. And—and once it’s all over, Kate, she managed to bully the realtors into selling her Elena’s tenement. Elena’s apartment is hers, forever. She can stay there as long as she wants.”

“Foggy should be the one to tell her that,” says Jen. “I think if it comes from anyone else she might faint. With Foggy, she’ll just c-cry.”

“You guys have been getting along, then.”

“What?” Jen sounds genuinely confused. “We never _didn’t_ get along. Did K-Karen tell you we weren’t getting along?”

“She said there was an aura.”

“Well, yes, having th-three people who don’t know how to move around each other crammed into one kitchen can create an aura. Karen is over-sensitive.” _Not exactly_ , thinks Darcy, but Jen’s never been good at admitting that she can be the most passive-aggressive vicemonster on the planet. “No, we g-get along fine. She’s been t-teaching me some Spanish. I should have learned more, back in law school. I’d’ve saved a f-fortune in translator fees.”

“This is why I kept telling you to give me things to work on.”

“You weren’t legal, then. It would have been wrong.” Foggy knocks on the half-open door to the bathroom, and makes a _holy shit_ face at her make-up. Darcy makes an alligator mouth with her fingers and jabbers it for a little while, because yes, Jen is shy, but Jen will _talk_ if she knows you. She will talk _a lot._ “Y-You know that. Until you passed the bar—”

“Jesus, Jen, bend the rules for once in your life.” She picks at her lipstick again, and then deems it acceptable. “What, Foggy?”

“Updates. Living room in five minutes, yeah?”

Her heart skips a beat. “Jen, honey, I have to go. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? Don’t kill people. Killing people is—it’s bad.”

“You haven’t met these people,” says Jen darkly, but Darcy can hear the smile in her voice. “I-I’m glad you’re okay. When—when Foggy said something had happened, I thought—I thought you’d been hurt.”

“Oh, Jen.” She wants to hug her. “I—yeah. I feel like shit, but you know what? I will make life rue the day it gave Darcy Lewis lemons. I’m gonna have my engineers make combustible lemons and throw them in life’s face. I will burn life’s house down.”

“Oh, Christ, shut up, you’ll give them ideas,” says Jen, though who _they_ are doesn’t exactly click. “I love you. B-Be safe, okay? Call me when you hear something.”

“Of course.” Her cover-up can’t do much for her throat—there are too many bruises, and they’re still too dark—but she’s wearing a turtleneck, so it doesn’t particularly matter. “Love you too, Jen.”

Jen hangs up without a goodbye (they share that, her and Jen, a hatred of goodbyes). Darcy tugs her fingers through the wig one last time, folds her broken glasses up beside her earrings and her nose stud, and slips out into the living room.

Claire’s still at work. It’s probably the only reason they’re able to have this conference in the middle of the afternoon, the only reason Karen’s eyes don’t bulge out of her head at the sight of Darcy with red hair and no glasses. Matt’s slinking around the kitchen, his shields back up on full power, face hidden behind his red glasses. He’s fidgeting with the coffee machine, though. Darcy leans next to Karen on the couch, cocking an eyebrow. “What?”

“Hello, succubus Darcy,” says Karen. She gives Foggy a sideways glance. “When’d you get those?”

Matt had presented them to her at about seven that morning, after they’d both settled enough to actually speak. He hadn’t been sure if she’d want them, the Lilith clothes, the things that let her be something else. The clothes that hide the better parts of her away. She shrugs. “I had my people pick them up.”

Matt coughs, and Karen’s lips twitch.

“We have news,” says Foggy. “Or, well, Matt of the bat-level hearing has news. I just have lots of griping from Brett. He’s been trying to get in touch with you for days.”

“My phone is broken.” She glances at Matt. “What news?”

“It’s not really news.” Matt lifts a shoulder. “Foggy’s overestimating.”

“I am _not_ overestimating. And yes, I know your phone is broken. I told Brett that. He’s still kind of mad.” Foggy’s eyebrows clench together. “He knows something’s up. He tried to get in touch with Jen, too, and when _she_ didn’t pick up he went to the apartment. Do you know how many coffees I had to bribe him with to keep him from raising a stink about it? _Jen’s on vacation_ , I said. _Jennifer Walters doesn’t take vacations_ , he said. _Darcy’s visiting family,_ I said. _Darcy doesn’t have any family she’d want to visit_ , he said, which, you know, is true, but it was the only thing I could come up with on short notice, and do you know how hard it is to think of decent excuses when he’s staring at you with his staring face? It’s really damn difficult—”

“Small words are good, Foggy.”

“Rich Goodman finally woke up,” Foggy says. Darcy squeezes her eyes shut. “He can't leave the hospital yet, but they've arrested him. Seventeen counts of rape. Apparently those—those girls, those names that Kate gave you, apparently Lynch remembered all of them. And he witnessed them. Every single one.”

“And he’s not dead?”

Foggy shrugs. “Guess Fisk doesn’t give a damn about Goodman’s shit right now. Not to mention Lynch and Jenson’s cell phones _mysteriously_ appearing on the doorstep of the 15th—did you know Goodman had a home video collection? Shared it with Lynch and Jenson. Scumbags.”

Darcy says nothing. She buffs her fingernails. (Hey, she’d had time, on the way to Karen’s baking lesson. And at least if it’s with the police she knows that the videos won’t be spread all over the internet, like they’re nothing but entertainment.)

“Anyway, Fisk has enough to worry about, what with him not being able to find you. Do either of you have _any idea_ how many people have been tailing me and Matt around the city looking for this place? A damn lot, before you answer. A whole damn lot. It is _really fucking expensive_ to pay cabs to drive you in circles for an hour, Lewis. You owe me so much money at this point, I can’t even.”

“I’m pretty sure I owe you my third of the rent check for the office, too, so we’ll make a tab for me.” Also hospital bills. And—and everything else, Jesus. She pushes that thought away. “What’s Goodman doing?”

“I mean, L and Z have lawyered him up, but Marci’s been slipping me files on the sly. They’re aiming for a plea bargain, but since Lynch has already agreed to testify in court for all seventeen counts of rape—he pleaded out, I think, Brett wasn’t clear—they can barely make their minimum offers. Nobody wants to bail this douchebag out, for obvious reasons. Also, there are a _lot_ of attorneys at Landman and Zack who work with Fisk, like, holy shit myself sorts of numbers. Matt estimated what, sixty percent?”

“Sixty-seven,” says Matt. “Judging from the names that they were reeling off.”

Matt having to meet up with Marci? She’d have paid to see that. Darcy cuts her eyes to Matt, but he has his Innocent Lawyer face on as he scrounges one sugar cube from the box left out on Claire’s counter, and drops it into his coffee. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.”

“Don’t you dare say _I told you so_ ,” says Foggy to Darcy, because Darcy can distinctly remember some things being said about how prestigious law firms do not equal lawful good law firms. But she holds her tongue. “It’s like a dominos game. If we can just whack Fisk, then—then all of it is going to come crashing down. The Goodmans will even have to find a new lawyer, and I guarantee you that if it’s anyone not on Landman and Zack’s payroll, we can smoke ‘em so hard their ears will burn like bacon. Why are you redheaded?”

“Because I was going to go out with Matt, later, and I didn’t want to have to mess with it. Also, because if Fisk is still looking for me, it’d be safer to leave Claire’s apartment if I don’t actually look like me.” She tugs at the edge of the wig again. “I know I’m not an awesome redhead, you don’t have to say it.”

“I have no problem with the gingerosity if it means that you survive the next three days,” says Foggy. “It’s just slightly unnerving. I feel like Natasha Romanoff is staring at me over cornflakes.”

“Ew, cornflakes.”

“Okay, so, let’s start from the beginning,” says Karen, curling into the side of the couch, holding onto her mug with both hands. She has her little Toshiba propped up against her knees. “Goodman’s a dead end, now. It’s wrapped up, and we can’t pull Fisk into it now that Andromeda’s scuppered. I mean, technically we _could_ bully the Goodmans into turning on Fisk, but that’s not something that would hold water right now. He has too much power, still, they’d be too scared. ”

“Blake’s dead,” says Matt, perching on the arm of the sofa. Darcy rests her hand on his knee without thinking about it, and neither Foggy nor Karen blink once. “And Hoffman’s missing, presumed dead. So they’re out.”

Foggy chews on his cuticle. “Brett says that a woman who looked a hell of a lot like Vanessa Marianna, Fisk’s girlfriend? She came in with a bunch of legal documents to keep the blind couriers in-country. Took them all out of custody, said that the 15th was violating their human rights or something. Marci hasn’t been able to get a hold of the papers, but she said they looked hella legit.”

“Not to mention that Marci’s found a _lot_ of stuff, though not all of it fits together.” Karen makes a noise in the back of her throat. “That’s something we should go over again.”

“For the millionth time? I think that’s the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

“That’s how we found Andromeda,” Karen says. Foggy shrugs.

“Okay, so we go over Marci’s stuff again. And again. Until our eyes boil. What else?”

“If Vanessa Marianna’s the one breaking the Triad’s drug runners out of police custody, then the Triad’s out of it, too.” And with the Triad gone, the yakuza will be scrambling to fill in the gaps. “What about the Japanese? I haven’t seen anything in the papers.”

“They’ve been falling apart since Nobu died, like I said. Most of them have gone very quiet. It’d make me nervous if we didn’t have bigger things to worry about.” Matt sips at his coffee. “It might be an option, if we dig into it deep enough, but from what I’ve heard, Fisk only dealt with Nobu and his right-hand man, Kim. Kim’s gone to ground since then, and the Kobayashis and the Matsuharas, they won’t know anything. And the rest of the Oriharas have ghosted. No one knows where they are.”

“What did they even want in the first place?” Darcy shakes her head. “Unless they were just in it for mischief and mayhem. Little Jack Frost up in this.”

“There were maps, in the warehouse. Construction plans. And when—Stick was after something called the Black Sky, the boy that—” He stops. Sweat breaks out on the back of Darcy’s neck. (— _tell me what you know about the Black Sky, and her finger isn’t a part of her anymore, it’s hanging like trash, and there’s blood, and blades, and_ —) “Stick said they were importing the kid into the country, had plans to house him somewhere nearby. Maybe the tenement that Tully was trying to sell to Fisk, maybe that was what they wanted.”

“Elena’s building?” Karen frowns. Matt (who’s probably picked up her heartbeat or smelled her fear or whatever it is he does that helps him know when she’s freaking out) rests his hand against the nape of her neck, pushing in a little with his thumb. Darcy closes her eyes. “It’d explain why Fisk was being so damn stubborn about it, trying to get a bunch of families out so he could give it to the yakuza. But why would they want _that_ building? There are a million just like it, all over the city.”

“That is a path full of bad thoughts, and we will stay away from it for the moment, because it’s not going to help us with Fisk.” Foggy winces. He must have broken skin on his cuticle. He drops his hand back to his lap, and wipes sweat from his palms. “Especially if Masklet here is right and the Orihara have pulled a Danny Phantom, gone invisible on us.”

“Fisk—Fisk told me that Wesley had left papers behind. But those are probably locked up tight somewhere, nowhere we could get at them.” Darcy chews her lip. “Another door slammed in our faces.”

“Tell them what you heard about that old dude, Matt. Owl-something.”

“Owlsley,” says Matt. She draws her hand off his knee, and rests both of hers in her lap. “Nobody knows where he is. His men are going nuts looking for him. Said he left the office a few days ago and just…vanished.”

“You think he’s dead?”

“No, because the cops are looking for him, Fisk’s cops. I heard them talking about it when we went to see Brett. They’re trying to find Owlsley, too.” His mouth curls a little. “But if a person like Leland Owlsley has gone to ground it’s more than possible he’s taken a jet to a very small island in the Caribbean, and conveniently forgotten to tell people about it. Not that I’ve found any evidence to support that.”

“And there’s really no one else?”

“Ben posted what he has online, so people can read it,” says Karen. “The—the story about Fisk killing his father. He says that people have been accessing the website.”

Foggy’s phone dings. He pulls it out of his pocket.

“It hasn’t generated enough chatter.” Matt shakes his head. “And Fisk can spin that however he wants. Even if it’s out, even if it _does_ make people reconsider, he still owns the news and the courts and the police. He can make people think whatever he wants.” The muscle in his thigh tightens under her hand, as if he’s keeping himself from sprinting. “Did you hear anything from Kate?”

“None of the people who bought drugs from Rich Goodman know where he found them, he never told them anything, blah blah blah, he was smart enough to cover his ass.” Darcy sighs. “Kate’s not happy.”

Kate had shouted her ear off for a good half an hour, so _not happy_ is an understatement, but, you know, understatements are okay right now. Understatements don’t make her ears hurt.

“Hey, guys?” says Foggy. “Brett says—Brett says they found a dead body at the docks last night.”

“What, like, in the water?”

“Nah, like… _on_ the docks. He said that it was one of Fisk’s bodyguards. The guy had his face blown off with a .22, looks like. According to the coroner.” He swallows hard. It feels as though there’s an electric current running through her, vibrating inside her skin. Darcy seizes Matt’s knee and holds on, because _oh my god._ “Says he had the shit beat out of him beforehand. Like, major bruising, broken orbital socket, everything. TOD registered as two days ago.”

The same night that Fisk had attacked her. “Fisk does have a temper. Maybe—maybe he beat the shit out of this dude before coming after me.” Or after. Since she’d managed to get away. _Do not go down that path. Do not do it._

“What was his name?” asks Matt. “Someone gets left on the docks, instead of thrown into the river, that’s a message for someone.”

“No ID on the corpse, but his dental records came up as a Francis Lawton.” Darcy digs her nails into Matt’s leg before she realizes what she’s doing. ( _—duct tape and blood as she looks at him, at them, screams and screams and screams—_ ) “Jesus, Brett’s gonna get his ass fired for telling me this shit. Says that they haven’t found a match in the ballistics system yet, but that takes days. The guy’s been photographed with Fisk before, one of his major bodyguard types. Shows up a lot.”

“Francis Lawton isn’t on Facebook,” says Karen. “I can’t find him in the yellow pages, either, or Twitter. This is him, though.”

She’s found a photo from one of Fisk’s many interviews, one of the few that includes side-shots of the men that circle him like dogs. It’s the same guy from the warehouse, Francis of the shitty tape job, Francis of the douchebro haircut and the flat, unsmiling mouth. Darcy closes her eyes, heaves a little. “He was, um. Yeah, he was one of Fisk’s. He was—he was with Wesley, when, uh. When this happened.”

She lifts her cast, and lets it fall again.

Karen’s mouth thins. She looks down at her computer, her eyelashes dusting her cheek. “He’s better off dead, then.”

Matt’s fingers contort a little against the back of Darcy’s neck, but he doesn’t say anything. Karen won’t meet her eyes. She spins her computer back around, hooking her hair behind her ears. “Sorry if that sounds terrible, but I’m not—I’m not particularly inclined to pity people who _chose_ to work for someone like Wilson Fisk.”

“If he works—worked for Fisk, he’s probably been off the grid as long as Fisk’s been. You can’t find James Wesley in the phone book, either, but we know how real _he_ was.” Foggy slaps his phone into his palm a few times. “But, I mean, one of Fisk’s personal guard gets whacked, that’s something, right? Why would he kill one of his own men?”

“Um, because it’s Fisk?” says Darcy.

“But he wouldn’t use a gun,” says Matt, and for an instant it’s _them_ again, Matt and Foggy and Darcy playing off each other the way they always do. “Fisk’s personal, he doesn’t like weapons. The Russians learned that. He blew them all up, cut the head off their leader himself. He doesn’t just shoot people. He doesn’t like to dirty his hands with firearms.”

Both Darcy and Karen flinch, for entirely different reasons. Then Karen clears her throat, and stares hard at her computer. “Like I said. Francis Lawton isn’t coming up with any matching hits. I can try and run a program that will go through available images on Google and Facebook, but his facial structure isn’t particularly unique. Codesource might be able to point me somewhere, and I can probably grab a bunch of code off of the Wire. Whatever.”

“Since when did you turn into Felicity Smoak?” says Foggy.

“Since you decided I was Oracle-Barbara in the Batfamily,” Karen replies, and tugs her hair up into a ponytail, wrapping the elastic into a tight band. “Besides, if Marci can hack into L and Z’s financial law intranet, I can write a stupid search program.”

“Marci did what now.”

Something tickles in the back of her head. “Marci said—Marci said something about a slush fund that she couldn’t figure out. When she was looking into Wexler Sports Equipment. Did she ever get anything more on that?”

“What, Rich Goodman’s private hooker fund?” Karen shakes her head. “No. Aside from interest, the numbers have stayed steady for the past week or so.”

“No, the—the other thing. She called it the backup disk, or something. The secondary fund, the one that wasn’t in most of the paperwork. Complicated stuff.”

“Oh.” She bites her lip. “The backup generator fund? No, not really. She hasn’t had a chance to get back into the intranet; Landman and Zack has been on high alert for the past couple days, according to Marci. Probably since Owlsley went missing, now that I think about it, but nobody would tell her anything.” Karen sighs. “It sounds like what they were doing at Union Allied, the pension fund. Complicated encryptions, lots of numbers, everything moving back and forth. If we get that, we could maybe blow Wexler wide open, but that won’t necessarily lead to Fisk.”

Foggy frowns. “Wait, how do you know this?”

“About the files?”

“About Marci.”

“Because I was mature enough to realize that I might need to get into contact with Marci Stahl, Mother of Dragons, even though she is actually really vicious?” Karen rolls her eyes. “I grabbed her phone number, Foggy, same day you had us meet with her because you had—whatever else you were doing.”

“Elena ambushed me, okay? I was looking up Spanish phrases _.”_

“Anyway,” says Karen, “I’ve been calling to check on her once a day, to keep her on track. Since no offense, Foggy-bear, but she seems like the sort of person to respond better to a whipcrack then a please-and-thank-you-ma’am.”

Foggy’s lips part. He stares at Karen for a full ten seconds, unable to speak. “I cannot work out if that is hot or terrifying, and it legit worries me.”

Karen’s ears turn a bit pink. She looks down at her computer again. “It’s safer than you talking with her. I mean, obviously you can meet up with her in person no problem and say it’s a pair of exes making up or whatever, but if anyone’s tracking the phone records of the people at L and Z, then too many missed calls from Foggy Nelson might ring a few bells. Fisk’s—Fisk’s been ignoring me since the start, thinks I’m not important. He’ll probably just assume we’re making friends and not really worry about it. If he’s even paying attention.”

She can feel blood surging in her head. Because Fisk had ignored _her_ since the start, too, until she poked just too far, until she learned just too much, and Karen’s already had Wesley after her, already nearly died so many times, she can’t handle it if it happens to Karen, too, she _can’t_ —

Matt touches her first knuckle, lightly, with two fingers. Then he turns her hand on his knee, so that her palm is facing up, and starts to trace a line between the veins in her wrist. He keeps his face perfectly clear, as if—as if this is all nothing, as if he can’t feel anything. He has more than one mask, she thinks, looking at him. There’s the devil, and then there’s Matt Murdock, and right now, she’s not sure which is covering up which. “He’s an animal backed into a corner, Karen. We know—we know what he does when he gets pushed too hard. Just be careful.”

“No, I know.” Karen lifts her computer, and settles it again. “Digital warrior. My first college boyfriend taught me a few old hacker tricks. I’m not exactly a member of Anonymous, and I don’t know how to cover my tracks all that well, but I can at least sculpt a few programs that aren’t completely bogus. And if Marci gets a chance to get back into the intranet, she said she was gonna leave me a back door so I can explore on my own.”

Darcy blinks. “She actually said that?”

“It was more like _if this comes back to me I will ditch you, Page. I will let you hang. But anything that’ll get me out of the line of fire is more than okay with me._ ” Karen shrugs. “Same difference, if you ask me.”

“But don’t computers have, like—identifying codes, or whatever?” Foggy’s fiddling with the hem of his shirt as if he’s never seen a seam before. “They could track you through that.”

“I mean, yes. Serial numbers, IP addresses, et cetera, et cetera.” She shrugs. “You’re talking about the IP address, though, and that’s a program I’ve had since high school. IP-cyclers, keeps the computer from ever displaying only one identity, or at least, switches between so many that most people wouldn’t be able to keep track. Won’t fool a really talented hacker-cracker type, but for the techs at Landman and Zack it should work well enough. Keeps people off my back for torrenting all the time.” She stops. “That is not something I should have said in front of lawyers.”

“Because we’re totally going to report you to the Feds for torrenting TV shows.”

“Whatever,” says Karen. “Besides—from what we can tell, Leland Owlsley was the guy who ran all of Fisk’s digital operations anyway, and since he’s AWOL, I don’t have to worry as much.”

“Could Owlsley be dead?” Darcy tips her head to the side, watching Matt sketch out patterns on the thin skin over her pulse point. If anything else, it’s keeping her from sliding back into terror, and she’ll take that. Even if it’s making her squirm a little. “If nobody’s heard from him in two days, then someone might have—he might have been killed and no one’s found the body yet.”

“It’s possible, especially with his guard being dead.” Matt uses his index finger to draw a line from her pulse to the very edge of her middle fingernail, his face still turned towards Karen and Foggy. She’s going to _hurt him_ , she decides, because her throat feels hot and her ears are flushed and she’s so, so mad that she’d put on the wig so early because if they look, they can _tell._ It’s not like she can just cover up her neck with her hair right now. (Whoever designed the turtleneck is a god among men.) When Matt tips his face towards hers, she can see the little smirk around his mouth, a bit sad, a bit shy, but mostly just— _hah_. “That’s what we’ll look into. Somebody had to have dumped the body. Somebody had to have seen something. And if somebody saw something, we can track them down.”

 _We._ She likes that word. Darcy scrapes her fingernails along the seam of his pant leg, and glances over at Foggy. “So Karen’s doing the programming, we’re going to look around outside once it gets dark enough—Foggy?”

“I’ll go over Marci’s paperwork again. The hard copy stuff that she brought out. Maybe I can find something more about this—this backup generator program that they were using there. It’s probably just another thing like Union Allied’s pension fund, you know, but it’s worth looking into.” He shrugs. “Especially since there’s not much else we have on our plates right now.”

“And if Kate’s still going into the drug angle, then we have some graspable straws. Very thin straws. Straws that could possibly be turned into a blanket for tiny, tiny mice. But they are straws, and we shall grasp them.” Darcy digs her fingernails into Matt’s knee again, and then pulls her hand away. “I’ll call Ben and see if he’s heard anything about Fran—about the body on the docks. That could help. And—and I can help you guys until dark. We can’t exactly go anywhere until the sun sets.”

“Because you’re vampires,” says Foggy, and gets to his feet. “Matt, can I talk to you? Outside.”

Matt stiffens. Foggy’s ears turn pink when he realizes how Darcy and Karen are staring at him, but he stands his ground. He curls his hands into fists at his sides, and he waits, not looking away, just staring hard at Matt as if through staring he’ll get Matt up, off the couch, and out the door faster. Darcy pushes her thumb into Matt’s hip, out of Foggy’s sight. He doesn’t react, for a moment. Then Matt gets up, stepping over the coffee mug someone (she thinks it may have been Claire) has left behind on the floor next to the couch. They don’t speak as they leave, just slink out and shut the door quietly behind them. Karen catches Darcy’s eye, and cocks a brow.

“Maybe,” Darcy says. There’s champagne bubbling in her throat. “We can hope. Gimme some papers.”

Their first stop isn’t the docks, but rather Melvin Potter’s garage in Battery Park, so Melvin can take some last second measurements and double-check that everything fits appropriately. He’s made Darcy a mask (which suddenly makes a whole lot more sense of his weirder measurements) and though it’s not finished, she gets to try it on. It slides down over her head like Batgirl’s hood (Barbara’s, not Cassie’s), pressing her hair close to her scalp, and though the eyeholes are barely even slits at this point, and there are no ears, she feels—she doesn’t know what she feels. There’s a frisson of _something_ creeping through her as she peers at Matt, waiting for Melvin to make minute adjustments in how it lays over her cheeks, across her nose. The only part of her face anyone will see is her mouth and chin, and she thinks— _red._ She’ll paint her mouth red, because she always paints her mouth red, but also because if all anyone is going to see of her is her mouth and her eyes, and she’s supposed to be the mother of monsters, well. She ought to make herself worthy of taking on the name of a succubus.

There’s a woman watching from her front porch when they slip out of Melvin’s garage and into the alley, one with a hijab the color of blood oranges and the sort of complexion that means she probably has to reel off seven different ethnicities when she fills out a form for anything. This must be Betsy, she thinks, because when she hears Melvin’s footsteps on the pavement and the clatter of the garage closing, she lifts her head from whatever file she’s looking over and comes down the stairs to greet him. Darcy watches them for as long as she can, and though she doesn’t have super-hearing like Matt does, she can see the way Betsy fusses over him, the way she seems to put her shoulders back and dare anyone to pity Melvin Potter. Because the neighbors do, she sees that too, poor Melly Potter alone in his garage with his needles and his issues. There’s a mother that urges her seven-year-old to walk faster as they pass Melvin and Betsy on Betsy’s stoop, and Darcy can see the way that gets Betsy’s back up, how it makes Melvin hunch into himself in a manner that she’s starting to recognize. Matt tugs her away, after, but it clings to her, that image. It lingers on the backs of her eyes, a photo in the darkroom of her mind.

They travel in silence through alleyways and over rooftops (she nearly throws up once, when she sees the drops, but she grits her teeth and keeps up). Matt’s thinking, she can see it in how he’s moving, and Darcy, well. She has her own thoughts to keep her occupied. (Though she really, really, _really_ wants to ask.) It’s only once they’ve clambered up a fire escape and onto the roof of a dockside warehouse four buildings down from the one Darcy had been tortured in that she finally clears her throat.

“Ask,” Matt says. “You’ve been buzzing for an hour.”

“Psh, you lie.” It feels weird, to be happy. Especially after all of the shit that’s gone down. But, you know, she’s started to take her happiness where she can find it. “Did you guys—are you okay now, or do I have to bash heads together?”

Matt crouches down on the edge of the roof, his face turned towards the river. Darcy tugs on her wig again, trying to get it settled properly. (Her wig cap’s gone funny, since she had to take the whole thing off to pose for Melvin.) He says, “He still doesn’t get it. But he’s not—he wasn’t angry anymore. Or sad.”

“He tell you that?”

“Yeah.” Matt lifts a shoulder. “And I couldn’t hear it anymore, either. Foggy—Foggy digs his nails in, when he’s mad. It’s like—almost like bubble-wrap. Faint, even for me. But I can hear it. He wasn’t doing it, when we talked.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” She hunches down next to him. “So you’re—good?”

“We can’t go back to what we were.” Matt rests his fingertips against the edge of the roof, not turning away from the river. “But yeah, I think—I think we’re good. For the moment.”

“Thank Christ.” It feels like there’s a hole inside her that’s suddenly been plugged, a fullness where there had been something empty. She wants to hug him, but she settles for knocking her shoulder into his, instead. Even if no one can see them up here, it seems like a dumb idea to tackle him while they’re in masks and gloves and serious faces. “What are you looking for?”

“Anybody,” says Matt. “Over there, there’s a hideaway for a homeless couple, two men, but it’s empty, they haven’t been there in a few days.”

“And the body was discovered last night, so they probably weren’t around.”

“Body was _discovered_ last night, didn’t mean it wasn’t dumped two days ago. I can smell it, where it was. It’s probably been there for a while, under a tarp, and when someone moved the tarp—”

“—someone moved the body.”

Matt shifts, points again. “Family of squatters in that end room. They might have seen something, if they were awake, but it’s unlikely. Father’s out, hasn’t been around in a few days. Mother’s asleep. One of the kids has pneumonia, isn’t doing well.”

“Pneumonia?”

“Crackle in the bronchial tubes, fluid in the lungs. Fever, sickness.” She’s never going to underestimate Matt’s senses again. “Ah.”

“What?”

Matt tips his head at the ground, and Darcy follows the gesture. There’s a man creeping through the shadows towards the empty dock that’s been cordoned off with yellow caution tape, shifting from box to box as if he can only survive if he stays away from the light. She tugs at her wig again, and wonders how the hell Black Canary does this shit. “Bad guy?”

“Same guy who told me about Fisk’s outfits,” says Matt, and stands. “Worked with the Russians.”

“The one who’s higher-up than he acts?”

“And smarter than he looks. Which doesn’t explain what he’s doing here.”

“Maybe he’s one of those gruesome people who like to look at old murder sites or whatever.”

Matt shakes his head once. “His heart’s beating too fast for that. Turk Barrett’s never struck me as someone who goes anywhere without a reason.” He heaves a breath, and lets it out again. “Stay in the shadows. Don’t let him see you if you don’t have to.”

“Not gonna tell me to stay on the roof?”

“Are you joking? I know you.” And with that, he jumps off the edge to the fire escape three storeys down. Darcy stifles a shriek ( _never going to get over that shit_ ) and does the much saner thing of clambering over the edge and onto the fire escape to climb down like a normal person instead of giving their—whatever she is, exactly, a fucking _heart attack_ , thank you, Matt Murdock.

He turns his face towards her halfway down the fire escape, and just _smirks_ at her, and she’s going to fucking kill him. The devil won’t die from a bullet or a knife. He’s going to die because she’s going to shove him off a fire escape.

She thinks she hears him laughing, but by the time she catches up, he’s gone silent and dark again. _Time for work, then, I suppose._

Turk Barrett doesn’t seem to have noticed the noise. He’s shuffling around just beyond the crime scene tape, muttering to himself. Darcy slinks from the fire escape to a nearby shipping crate, left open and untouched. Her taser is heavy against her thigh as she rests her head against the cool, damp metal, closing her eyes to listen. She can catch one or two phrases, maybe. _Fucking idiot_ is one of them. He’s so involved in what he’s doing that he doesn’t hear Matt coming up behind him until the devil puts both hands against Turk’s back, and shoves him hard.

“Jesus Christ!” He barely catches himself, hand going for his gun, but when he sees the mask, he stops. “What the hell, man, I told you what you wanted to know, you said you’d leave me alone!”

“Funny, I don’t remember that.” The devil shifts from one foot to the other. Darcy rolls her neck a little, listening hard. “Don’t touch it, Turk. You know I know exactly where you keep all your backups. I can break your wrist and have you in the water before you even get close.”

“Judas priest.” Turk throws his hands in the air. “What the fuck. I’m not your fucking punching bag, man! Can’t you go pick on someone else? There are loads of people out tonight, just ask around! Tryin’ to find all this—all these fucking missing people, Jesus, it’s like that fuckin’ Lolita guy is just going around grabbing people or whatever, you’d think there were aliens abducting half the city.”

 _Wait. The guy from_ Lolita _is an alien?_   She’s confused.

“You mean Loki,” says Matt, and suddenly it all makes sense again. “And no. Who’s missing?”

“Owlsley.” Turk creeps back, towards the water, but freezes when Matt steps forward. “We thought fuckin’—goddamn Francis was with him until they found the body today. Wanted to see if there was anything left behind, get a head start on the rest.”

“On the rest?”

“Aw, come on, man, don’t make me—”

She looks up from her taser just in time to see Matt punch Turk hard in the face. Then again, when Turk staggers. And again, when his knees hit the dock. She watches without blinking, feeling curiously removed from it. There’s a flash of memory in the back of her head, a pipe flicking through the night air, the hollow _crack_ it made in breaking bone. Turk fumbles for something in his boot, but Matt snaps around into a sharp roundhouse that has Turk flat on his side, his nose broken, a bruise puffing up on his temple. Matt takes the knife from his boot, and chucks it out into the river.

“Goddammit, man, that was my grandfather’s!”

“Sorry,” says Matt, not sounding sorry at all. Turk spits out blood and something else that looks a little like a tooth. “Who are the rest, Barrett?”

“Fisk’ll fucking kill me if I talk to you, you know that—”

“Didn’t stop you before.”

“Yeah, well, everyone thought you’d be dead in a day or two. Figured it wouldn’t hurt anyone if I told you about Wilson’s pet retard.” Darcy clenches her hand into a fist, and knocks her head against the storage container. “But what the fuck are you, even? I heard what Nobu did to you and you’re still fucking walking—”

“I’m a stubborn son of a bitch,” says Matt, and seizes Turk by the collar of his shirt. She’s not sure exactly what happens—a twist, a snap, a swirl of motion—but then Turk hits another nearby storage container with a _clang_ that could wake a coma patient, landing hard on his ass in a way that looks completely agonizing. “You’re annoying me, Barrett.”

“This always how you deal with people that annoy you?” asks Turk, and whacks his head a few times against the storage unit. It makes a hollow _thunking_ sound. He coughs, and it sounds a little wet. “Shit, man. You broke my ribs.”

“I can break more.”

“Jesus shit a _priest_.” Turk squeezes his eyes shut. _One of the Russians’,_ Matt had said _. Higher up in the organization than he acts. Smarter than he looks._ And he looks like someone simple, like someone easy to overlook. Leather jacket, expensive but not treated well. Shiny shoes, same deal. Loud shirt, something like a stereotype of a pimp would wear, and she’s pretty sure he picked it on purpose. Underneath the button down there’s a thin black t-shirt, and that seems more like something an information broker would wear, something dark and subtle and notice-me-not. He’s chaos by design. “Look, you know I can’t tell you shit. There’re other guys wandering around tonight doing the same thing I am, ask one of them. Go break their fucking ribcage, see if they want to talk to you.”

“But we have such a good working relationship already,” says the devil. He shifts from one foot to the other, balancing on the balls of his feet, ready to strike. “Wouldn’t want to break that up.”

“You are a scary-ass motherfucker, you know that?” Turk heaves himself up to a semi-sitting position. “Shit. All I know is that Fisk wants the guy who killed Francis found, okay? Theory is—theory is it was someone in Owlsley’s group. But Owlsley’s _missing,_ so they want—they want the killer dragged out from whatever rock they’ve found, and made an example of. Thought I’d check out the dump site, see what I could find. That’s _all_.”

“Lie,” says the devil, and when Turk raises a hand towards his waist he lunges. Turk slams back against the container again, making a noise like a deflating tire, as Matt wrests the gun from him and throws it aside. It skitters nearly to Darcy’s feet, and she flexes her gloved hand before picking it up and ejecting the clip, shoving one piece into each boot. Turk doesn’t seem to notice. Then again, his head’s probably ringing from the strike. “What have I told you about lying to me, Barrett?”

Turk Barrett doesn’t say anything for a moment. He seems to be struggling to keep his guts from coming up. Then he starts cursing, in Russian at first, then in Louisiana Creole (it makes her skin creep to hear it, she hasn’t heard Creole in years, not since Atlanta, not since Eli), and then a language with three distinct clicking sounds that she doesn’t have a clue how to identify. It sounds like something she’d hear in a documentary on apartheid South Africa. Then he says, “I’m not signing my own _death warrant_ , you masked shit. You want information, you get it from someone else.”

“Oh,” says the devil. “Same way if the Russians want girls, they get them from someone else?”

“Hey, man, I just—I just do the jobs I’m told to do. Don’t hold that against me.” Turk presses a hand to his bloody nose, and curses. “Fuck. I’m never getting this shit out.”

 _Human trafficker,_ memory whispers _._ She can remember articles from a month or so ago, maybe a little more. College coeds being stolen out of the Kitchen, put in packing containers, shipped off on Russian boats. Something uncurls in the base of her throat, humming quietly. _Human trafficker._

Who else does he know, she wonders.

“You have a choice here, Barrett,” says the devil, and he steps back, away from Barrett, to grab a two-by-four that someone’s left on the dockside. It looks like something from the trash pile, rusty nails sticking out of one end. Matt spins it between his hands. “You talk to me, or I give you to Fisk. And you _know_ what Fisk does when he feels embarrassed. Remember Anatoly?”

Turk knocks his head against the container again. “Yeah, see, about that—you don’t kill people. And I’d rather live my life out in a hospital bed with a tube down my throat and watching goddamn telenovelas all day then talk to you. I’ve learned my lesson. Besides.” He spits out more blood. “That was my _grandfather’s fucking knife_ , you asshole.”

“I want to talk to him,” Darcy says, too quietly for Turk Barrett for hear. “You mind?”

Matt rolls his shoulder, and swipes the two-by-four against the ground. It makes a terrible scraping sound. “Your backup Glock,” he says, and holds his hands out to Turk. “Give it to me.”

“What, so you can throw that into the ocean, too? No. I’m not fucking stupid, you’ll break my head open with that fucking thing before I can get my hand on it.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Matt spins the two-by-four again, and Barrett watches him do it, his eyes fixed on the nails. “Give me the gun, Barrett.”

Turk stares at him for a moment. Then he closes his eyes. “Judas fucking priest,” he says, but he heaves himself around and draws another gun out of the back of his pants, holding it out by the barrel. Matt takes it, and removes the clip, throwing that into the water. “Jesus Christ, you said you wouldn’t.”

“Did I?’ Matt throws the empty gun into the garbage pile. “I don’t remember.”

“You _asshole_.”

“You can come out,” says Matt, and Turk Barrett blinks twice. Matt lifts the two-by-four, and presses the end of it into Turk’s windpipe. “Move, and I break your skull.”

“Thought that was what you were already doing,” says Turk. Darcy tugs her taser from the holster, wrapping her fingers tight around the handle. “Who the fuck are you even talking to?”

“Me,” she says, and steps out from behind the crate. She doesn’t like leaving the shadows; she can almost feel them clinging to her skin, making her hard to see, hard to understand. But she does, and Turk Barrett’s eyes widen at the sight of her. He pushes back harder against his container, looking first at her, then at the devil, then at Lilith again, before cursing under his breath.

“Holy shit. Lynch was telling the fucking truth.” He looks up at Matt, and starts to laugh. “Jesus Christ, there are _two_ of you whack-jobs running around? Fisk is gonna shit his pants.”

“Keep your mouth shut unless I ask you to open it,” says Matt, and taps Turk none-too-gently on his jaw with the two-by-four. Turk bites his tongue, and swears under his breath. “Ask what you wanted to ask,” he tells her. “The longer he’s awake, the more I want to break his skull.”

“Well, that’s not friendly at all,” Darcy says, and shakes her hair back out of the way of the mask. Atlanta’s creeping out of her again. _Atlanta doesn’t run in your veins like a cancer?_ Fisk whispers, and she knocks him aside in her head, trying not to think of it. _It beats at you, batters you. The neighborhood you grew up in, the docks where your best friend rotted._ But he’s not wrong, not about Atlanta. Only about her. “If you’re not careful, Turk here will start to think we haven’t been asking nicely.”

“This is nice,” says Turk. Blood shines on his chin. “Yeah, sure. This is nice.”

Darcy looks at him, and lets her mouth curve up. “You still have your head, don’t you?”

His eyes widen. Turk presses his lips tight together, and says nothing.

Darcy tips her head. “So. Turk. You're smarter than you look, we know that. We also all know you’re lying, but lemme see if I can guess the truth. I’m good at guessing games.” She twirls her hand, lets him see the taser. “See, Francis was left here to send a message. Owlsley’s missing, and you’d think, at first—someone killed Francis, took Owlsley. But see, if that had been what happened, it’d be all over the news. _Leland Owlsley, Chief Financial Officer of Silver and Brent, taken from his bed in the middle of the night. Heroic bodyguard slain in defense._ ” She frames the headline with her gloved hands. “The city loves Fisk. Fisk—he could spray this _everywhere_ if he wanted Francis’s killer found, and nobody would think anything of it. But that’s not what he wants, is it?”

Turk draws his knees closer to his chest, and chokes a little when the two-by-four presses into his windpipe. “Whatever. You have a point?”

“Fisk doesn’t want Francis’s killer found. He wants _Owlsley_ found. We knew that before we even found you, Turk. And you’re sniffing around out here because you think someone left something behind.” She raises her eyebrows behind her mask. “How am I doing so far?”

“Well done,” says Turk. “You put two and two together to make four. I don’t have a cookie for you, though, sorry.”

Matt presses hard into his throat with the plank, until Turk makes a wet choking sound. Then he pulls back, just a little. One of the rusty nails has opened a little cut against the side of Turk’s neck. “You think Owlsley’s dead?”

“That son of a bitch? We’d know if he was dead. No, I think he’s gone to ground. He always has an ace up his sleeve.” He eyes her mask, her chest, her wig. “Who the fuck are you supposed to be, that Avenger bitch? Natasha Romanoff?”

“I hear she’s tetchy when people call her a bitch,” says Darcy, and crackles the taser. “So I wouldn’t.”

“Jesus, whatever.” Turk looks at Matt again. “Look, I don’t have a clue where Owlsley would be, but Francis—Francis was one of Owlsley’s men, okay? Told me once when he was wasted out of his skull, said he was in debt to the old man’s son and this was how he was paying it off. Owlsley shifted some cash around, changed his name, social security number, fucking everything. Supposed to be Owlsley’s spy in Fisk’s camp. My guess is someone on Fisk’s side figured it out and had him roasted. There’ve been other people going missing, too, men that Fisk used to trust, turned to smoke. Probably Owlsley’s guys. All of them will end up on the docks sooner or later, squeezed dry of whatever Owlsley ever told them.”

“What does this have to do with Owlsley?”

“Christ, you’re both thick.” Turk rolls his eyes. He almost seems to be enjoying this. “Owlsley spying on Fisk? Owlsley’s spy getting caught? I wouldn’t be surprised if Fisk has all his men in a bunker somewhere flaying the skin off of them while they’re still alive. Dude has a temper. Doesn’t like it when people stab him in the back. And Owlsley, he stabs everyone in the back.”

Fisk has a temper, but not a temper like that. Fisk runs hot and cold, a swirling cloud of rage. She’d be more inclined to believe the idea of Owlsley and all of Owlsley's men dead by Fisk’s hand if it was _Owlsley_ ’ _s_ body they’d been investigating on the docks tonight, left behind in pieces.

“Turk.” His eyes snap back to her. “Come on. You think you _know_ who killed Francis Lawton, don’t you?”

“Yeah, like I’m gonna talk to you.” He scowls. Then his eyes dip to her chest again. The leer he pastes on is more calculated than legitimate. “Well, unless you’re nice to me.”

“Watch it, smart guy, or I’ll shove this down your throat.” She buzzes the taser again. _God, everyone just has to be pretend to be a fucking stereotype. Japanese ninjas, black gangbangers, Chinese fortune cookies. What the fuck even is this. Am I going to start singing mariachi music every time I step out the door, soon, just to make people think I'm harmless?_ “Who do you have in Fisk’s inner circle?”

“Who says I have anybody?”

“You’re really not very good at lying, Barrett,” says Matt. He jams the two-by-four up higher against Turk’s throat. “Which is funny, considering.”

“Ow, _Jesus_ , fine!” He leans away from both of them, spitting. “Fine. Jesus Christ, I’m so dead for this.”

“You can be dead now or dead later,” Darcy tells him. “What I’m tempted to do? Dump you in a room with all those women you tried to sell into slavery. No gun, no knife, no weapons, and all of them, all those girls—I wonder what they’d want to do to you.”

For the first time, Turk actually looks frightened. He stares at her. “Look, like I said, that was a _job._ ”

“Yeah, I’m sure they feel that way.” She buzzes her taser, and he flinches a little. “Answer the fucking question, Barrett. My friend here, he’s not patient.”

“It’s a character flaw,” says the devil.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” Turk closes his eyes, tips his head back. “Fisk’s bodyguards, they’re not as loyal as Fisk likes to think. Lots of old mercs, lots of young blood, trying to get a start somewhere. One of ‘em, Kristopher, he’s a chauffeur, mainly. Said a few nights ago he picked up Fisk’s new fling from one of the apartments he has all over the city, and she had a .22 in her purse.”

“ _Vanessa Marianna_ shot Francis Lawton?” Darcy snorts. “The woman owns an art gallery and volunteers at the ASPCA. Highly unlikely.”

“Kristopher told me one of his boys saw the woman do it,” Turk says. “Said she was like—who’s that princess in the new Disney movie, with all the snow in it.”

“Elsa?”

“Yeah, Elsa. The Ice Queen. Fucking—he said her eyes were dead. Like she hadn’t even considered any other option. _Dealing with trash_ , she called it. Said to make sure that the body was cleaned up before she came back to the apartment.”

 _Lucifer fuck me up the ass with a pitchfork._ Maybe Vanessa and Fisk are more reflective of each other than she guessed. “You’re sure that’s what happened?”

“Kristopher doesn’t lie to me. I put him in Fisk’s way. First through the Russians, then here. He owes me his job. Motherfucker can’t lie to me if he wants to keep it.” He eyes her, gives her a sly little smile. “You’re the one who said I’m smarter than I look.”

“Yeah, you’re a quick ride to MENSA.” She huffs. “Quit the act. People are searching for Owlsley to get in Fisk’s good books?”

“Fisk offered twenty mil to anyone who finds the guy in the next week. More tacked on every day after.”

Holy shit. So they can kill him? Or so they can do something more? She runs her thumb over the trigger of the taser. “Why?”

“You joking? I don’t—”

Matt jabs the plank into him again, hard into his stomach, and Turk heaves. Darcy darts back out of the way just before he pukes all over the dock.

“Oops,” says the devil. “I’m allergic to liars.”

“Fine!” Turk rolls onto his back, staring at the sky. “Jesus fucking Christ on a sand dune in Mecca. Fine. One of Owlsley’s spies told Fisk that Owlsley has Hoffman, and nobody knows where the fuck he is. Says that—that if he’s not the one to collect Hoffman from freezer storage, Hoffman’s gonna go right to the Feds. Drop everything he knows in their laps. Hoffman’s been a part of this shit for years, man, he knows _everything_. Brother has eyes in the back of his head and ears on his fucking elbows, and that’s gonna put Fisk right up shit’s creek, if someone finds him before Fisk does.”

So they’re looking for Owlsley to find Hoffman. “Wouldn’t it just be easier to ignore Owlsley and look for Hoffman instead?”

“Owlsley has back-ups for his back-ups for his back-ups. Word is he’ll pull the plug on Hoffman if anyone gets near him without his permission. Used to have a daily check-in set up. Owlsley didn’t call in, Hoffman’d be dropped up with the FBI in a pretty little package.”

“And now?”

“New orders. Hoffman’s on lockdown. Nobody gets near him without Owlsley. And Owlsley—” he flicks his fingers. “ _Fft._ Gone. Mirage in a sandstorm. Nobody knows where he is. Only thing anybody _does_ know is that if Owlsley’s not the one to collect Hoffman, then Hoffman gets dropped into the warm and welcoming arms of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and we’re _all_ royally fucked.”

Is this how it feels to get struck by lightning? The hair on the back of her neck rises. Her whole body is churning, vibrating, _steaming._ She looks at Turk for a long time, just staring at him until Turk starts to twitch. “Your witchy bitch is creepy,” he tells Matt, and Matt doesn’t do a thing. He just stares too. “Oh, okay, so you’re both—staring contest time. This is _completely_ normal.”

“Hoffman is alive,” Darcy says. “You’re _sure._ ”

“Yes! I’m sure. Fisk wouldn’t be flipping so much of a shit otherwise.”

 _Hoffman’s alive._ And if they don’t find him first, they’ll never have a chance like this again. “You know what, Turk,” she says, “in a few hours, you’re going to be really glad about this. But I don’t think you’re going to enjoy it now.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

She tases him. In the same moment, Matt flips the two-by-four to the non-nailed end, and slams it across his head. Turk hits unconsciousness like a semi-truck, his muscles still twitching from the electricity snapping through his veins. Out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees someone peering through the window Matt had said belonged to the squatters. She waves a little, and pushes her taser back into the holster.

“Should we leave him here or drop him off with the police?”

“He’ll be out within the hour, if we give him to the cops.” Matt considers Turk’s unconscious body, and then heaves him into the storage unit, slamming it shut. He wedges his two-by-four into the handles. “They might find him in the morning. Or he might get shipped to China. Who knows.”

“I’m sure they’ll love him there.” Darcy rubs her thumb over the handle of her taser. “What about Hoffman?”

“Owlsley won’t give us Hoffman,” Matt says. “Owlsley only ever works for himself.”

“We don’t need Owlsley. You heard what Barrett said. Anybody gets near Hoffman, they’re supposed to give him to the Feds. He’ll turn on Fisk, he’s already agreed to it. He wouldn’t still be alive otherwise.” She shakes her head. “We don’t need Owlsley, Matt, we just need Hoffman. Hoffman’s _alive._ Hoffman can—if we give Hoffman to the police—”

“—Hoffman will roll over, give everything up, and if he knows as much as Barrett says he does, he could dismantle the whole thing. And if we get the Goodmans to turn on top of that—” He’s _buzzing_. She feels like when she closes her eyes she would be able to see the energy curling off him, almost in a halo. “If we don’t do this fast, Fisk will erase it all. He’ll cover it up.”

“I’ll get the Goodmans,” she says.

“Alone?”

“No, I’ll take Kate.” They need another name for Kate. It feels unsafe to talk about her in public, even if Matt would know if anybody was listening. “She can spot me.”

“They’d recognize her if she gets too close.”

“Kate’s a sharpshooter. She doesn’t need to be close.” She looks at Turk’s storage container. “You think he was a plant? You think Owlsley sent him here, trying to get us involved?”

“Even if he is, we can’t risk missing this chance. There won’t be another opportunity like this, not with Fisk.” Matt turns his face to the sky for a moment. Then he reaches out one hand. “Come on. We need to tell the others.”

Darcy doesn’t hesitate in taking it.   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Turk Barrett entertains me. His racist stereotyping in the show was something else entirely. 
> 
> I will get to y'all's reviews tonight or tomorrow. Somehow.


	22. The Wrath of the Lamb

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently I was overly ambitious in saying that the final chapter would just be one chapter. One more "official" chapter after this, and then the epilogue, because if I'd kept it to one it would have broken 27k and I didn't want to inflict that on you guys.
> 
> (alix is a wordy shit)
> 
> All of you should listen to "Angel of Small Death and The Codeine Scene" by Hozier because I love it and it reminds me of both Karen and Lilith. 
> 
> Trigger warnings for: hospitals, death threats, allusions to violence, gratuitous tasing, the symptoms of heart failure (including hyperventilation, foaming mouth, blood, and constricted breathing), misogyny and misogynist language, and death. 
> 
> AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA IT'S THE LAST TWENTY MINUTES OF THE SERIES YOU GUYS LET'S SEE HOW MANY WORDS ALIX CAN TURN THAT INTO
> 
> Once again, unbeta'ed. If there are problems, fuck everything.

The package arrives at ten am on the third morning.

Vanessa’s barely awake. She’s starting to realize that the poison has done more to her than she’d ever anticipated. The pain in her nerves, yes, that’s something she’s learning to deal with (and she hates the idea of having to _always_ deal with it, this endless, irreparable agony inside her skin, her own body working against her the way it always has), but the exhaustion—that’s something else entirely. She’s used to being able to just drink an espresso and keep going. When she sets up an exhibition for the gallery there are times she’ll go two, three, even four days without sleep, and she might not be in college anymore, might be getting older, but it’s still something she can manage. Now she can barely last three hours without feeling like she needs to sleep for ten, and it’s driving her _crazy_.

Wilson tells her that she needs to rest, she needs to take care of herself, but they don’t have time. “I said I would be at your side,” she tells him, the first time she faints (the first time in her life that she faints, and isn’t that embarrassing). “I’m not about to let something like this stop me.”

“It would kill me if you died,” Wilson says, simply. “You have to protect yourself, Vanessa.”

“Something like this isn’t going to kill me,” she says, and she’s going to turn it into a promise. No, nothing like this will kill her. She’s not that weak.

Then, of course, she faints a second time. Vanessa sleeps for a while, after. She’s stubborn, yes, but she’s not stupid. She can’t do anything if she’s fainting everywhere.

Still, she’s nursing her seventh cup of coffee (it’s not even making a dent in the headache lurking behind her eyes, and she can barely lift her papers anymore, _that_ is how badly her fingers hurt) and trying very hard to sit upright in her chair when Christian’s walkie-talkie crackles. There’s a smattering of military gobbledygook through the static, and when he looks up, it’s at her, not at Wilson. “Sir,” he says, not looking away from Vanessa. “Kristopher says there’s a package that just came in downstairs for Miss Vanessa. Signed pickup only.”

“Then sign for it,” says Wilson, distracted by numbers. He’s been going through his copy of Leland Owlsley’s numbers, since Vanessa told him that Owlsley was spying on them all. (He’d broken a desk into pieces when she’d told him of that, bellowing like a wounded animal, and she’d watched and waited for him to settle before coming forward and wrapping her arms around his neck, pressing her head to his chest, grounding him, steadying him.) When Christian doesn’t respond, he lifts his head. “Is there a problem?”

“Kristopher says that Miss Vanessa has to be the one to sign for it.” Christian darts a look at Wilson before looking back at Vanessa, and yes, she’s very glad she’d shot Francis in front of Christian. She thinks Christian might kill for her, and it’s only been three days. _God bless men and their libidos._ “Says that it was a special stipulation. Has to be her. ID and everything.”

Wilson goes still, a wolf scenting blood. “Send him up,” he says, and Christian turns away from them both to mutter into his walkie-talkie again. He pushes his laptop most of the way shut, and turns to look at Vanessa. “Do you know what this is?”

“No.” Vanessa leans back in her chair, pressing her fingertips to her temples. It sends sparklers of pain through her hands, through her head, but it soothes at the same time. Maybe living with constant pain is her Faustian contract, to be here. Maybe she’s supposed to exist with this forever, to be able to be here, side-by-side with Wilson Fisk, changing the world for the better. “I have no idea what it might be. I didn’t tell the gallery where I would be staying, they wouldn’t know to send things here.”

“Then it could be a threat.” Wilson rests his large hand against her shoulder, so delicately that it only barely aches. “Leland has already tried to have you killed once. Something like this…the whole thing makes me uneasy.”

“I doubt that Leland Owlsley will be sending me a bomb via courier, Wilson,” she says, and it’s a joke, but he just bristles at the idea. “No, don’t. My sense of humor goes dark places when I’m not—when I’m tired. I’m sure it’s nothing.” But even as she says it, her brain starts lurching into high gear again, because she _hasn’t_ told anyone where she’s been staying. Wilson keeps his home address off the grid, protective as he is of everything that he really calls _his_. She’s finding that despite everything he owns, all his properties and companies, all his men and all his books and all his plans, there are really very few things Wilson actually calls _his._ His mother he hides; his past he disguises; his dreams he keeps to himself. And this place, this penthouse, is his sanctum sanctorum. He keeps it safe for a reason. The only people who would know to find her here would be those who were part of the conspiracy, and that pool is very, very small at this point. She presses her palm over his, squeezing until her fingers hurt (not that that takes much, nowadays) and then forces her swollen feet back into her heels. If there’s something happening, she’s going to meet it standing.

The courier’s looking at his signature pad when the elevator doors open. He’s short and slender, Indonesian if she has to put a history to him, and when he looks up, his eyes get a bit big. Still, in true New York style, he hides it away and cracks his gum rather than comment. “Vanessa Marianna?” he says to her, because she’s the only woman in the room. The package is under his arm, too thin to be anything other than papers. Or maybe a laptop. “Package for you.”

“I’ll take it,” says Wilson, and the courier’s eyes get even bigger at the sight of Wilson Fisk, but he shakes his head.

“Nah, has to be her. Instructions were very specific.” Christian shuffles a little, and she wonders if the way his jacket shifts ever so slightly to the side to show off his holster, his gun, is intentional or not. She thinks it is. Rather than being frightened, the courier wrinkles his nose. “And yes, before you ask, we’ve scanned this puppy the way we scan everything. No hazardous materials, no explosives. Before you ask,” he says again, because Christian looks ready to.

Wilson opens his mouth, but Vanessa sets a hand to his shoulder. “It’s all right,” she says, and she keeps her spine straight and her walk steady as she takes a few steps forward, and offers her driver’s license. The man takes it, his eyes flicking between her photograph and her face, and she can see a bit of doubt there. She understands that—after all, she’s thinner than she was, her cheekbones too sharp, her skin too pale. Even her hair is flatter, as if her sickness is eating her from the inside out. (And she thinks of her mother, alone in that cavernous hospital bed, her head shaved and her eyes hollow, a bedpan at her side for when she vomited and the tumor in her stomach so large it looked as if she’d been four months pregnant—) She must pass muster, though, because the courier returns her ID to her, and offers the signature pad. Vanessa swipes out her initials, holding the stylus carefully so that her hand doesn’t shake, before pressing the _accept_ button. It’s only then that he hands over the package, and it’s a bit heavier than she expected. Something slides around against the cardboard. “Thank you.”

His nametag reads _Liem._ “You’re welcome,” he says, and he scuttles back into the elevator before anyone else can say a word. She waits until the elevator doors have closed before turning back to the desk, setting the package down as gently as she can considering her hands are trembling. “Would you mind opening it, please?” she says to Wilson. “I don’t think I’ll be able to wield a pen knife, at the moment.”   

Wilson presses his mouth thin, but he turns the box on its side, and slits through the tape. The address is typed, rather than handwritten, and the return is to the Museum of Natural History. Probably a red herring, considering she’s only ever met one person from the Museum of Natural History, and that was one of the board of directors, coming into her gallery for a painting. (The woman had very lovely, hadn’t pushed Vanessa for a second date. She’d enjoyed it considerably.)

There are three things inside the package. The first is a small laptop, barely a notebook, with no insignia on the case to say whether it’s Apple or PC. It looks almost custom, and when she turns it, lifts the screen, there’s a small _L_ lasered into the lower right-hand corner of the keyboard. Wilson stiffens at the sight of it, but he pushes the laptop aside without a word. The second portion is a collection of files, rubber-banded together and scribbled on in a scruffy handwriting she doesn’t know. The third is what interests her most, a small, cream envelope with only her first name marked across the front. She holds out her hand for it, and Wilson gives it to her without a word.

The sheet of paper inside isn’t signed with a name. Instead, there’s a small, curving serpent inked into the lower right-hand corner. Vanessa thinks of the packets of heroin at one of the spare warehouses Iris’s people had led her to, and frowns.

 _Vanessa,_ it reads _._

_I instructed my men to hold off on offering this final confirmation of our agreement until word came in that my people were, indeed, protected. If you are reading this, you have proven yourself to be a woman of your word. Thus, I will prove myself to be similar._

_I took the liberty of leaving Leland Owlsley in a safe location for you to collect at your leisure. He is not dead, or he ought not to be; I can’t say for certain. Finding him is, if I may be so bold, your first exam. I said I would teach you how to exist in this world you’ve entered, and I shall, even if it is only at a distance._

_I assume that by this time you have also uncovered Hoffman’s continued existence. I wish you luck in finding him. It only took me two days._

讀萬卷書不如行萬裡路.

Vanessa stares at the letter. Then she lets it fall to the desk. Wilson takes it, and scans through it, his eyebrows climbing higher and higher up his forehead. His fists clench. “She is disrespecting you.”

“Isn’t that what teachers do?” says Vanessa, and starts rubbing her temples again. “I don’t know that the Chinese means, but I assume it’s something professorial.”

“It says _dú wàn juǎn shū bùrú xíng wànlǐ lù_.” Wilson’s mouth creases. “ _There is nothing like trying._ ”

“As I expected.” Vanessa closes her eyes. “Highly professorial.”

“Madame Gao has always had a tendency for the esoteric.” He looks like he wants to crumple the letter into a ball. Instead, he lays it on the desk again, carefully straightening it. “This is Leland’s computer.”

“Then I assume these are his papers,” she says. “Whatever Iris has done with Mr. Owlsley, the letter indicates he’s probably alive. And in hiding, though not of his own will. Which I’m sure irritates him a great deal.” She’s only met Owlsley once, at the press conference where Wilson announced his presence to the city, but he’d given her the same looks as all the old men who have always dismissed her. Like because she’s younger than they are, because she’s female and likes lipstick, it means she’s only something to be fucked. She pushes that thought away. “This—these files can’t be the totality of his paperwork. The rest would be at Silver and Brent.”

“And at Landman and Zack, both of which are beyond our legal reach.”

Not their illegal reach, which if they used they could have the entirety of Owlsley’s legal documentation at the apartment in forty minutes. But she’d rather not be so obvious. Vanessa snips the rubber band off the files. “Iris wouldn’t send these documents unless she had selected them very carefully. The answer must be in here, somewhere.”

“There may also be a clue to Hoffman’s whereabouts, though I doubt she’d be so helpful.” Wilson sighs, and stands. “I will speak to my men. Boost the search numbers. We will find them, Vanessa. And then it will finally be settled.”

There’s a whisper in the back of her head, a murmur she can’t shake off. _Can’t you hear the way your lover’s castle is tumbling around his ears?_ Vanessa twitches a little. She can’t help but wonder if Iris was right, if there’s no way they can fix this, if the mask and his people have already destroyed everything they’ve been trying to build. _No. I will fix this. I will._ “Good,” she says, and opens the first file. “I’m going to start going over this. Will you be back soon?”

“In a few hours. I have to meet with Senator Cherryh about polling numbers. It’s something that I’ve let slide the past few days.” He rests his palm to the back of her head, sets his mouth to her scalp. It stings, but it drips warmth through her, too, and she leans into it with a sigh. “Christian will be here if you need anyone, and Kristopher is still on duty downstairs. Call if you find something.”

“Of course. Say hello to the senator for me.”

With a whisper of his shoes across the carpet (the still-fresh carpet, because they called the cleaners in within ten minutes of the blood hitting the fabric) Wilson is gone. Christian stays at his post beside the elevator doors, hands folded behind his back. Her mind skitters, settles again into cold hard fact. Christian’s last name is LaBarr, she remembers. He’s from Brooklyn. Vanessa looks down at the paperwork, unmarked with any insignia, and her head spins a little. It’s all numbers. She majored in art history, for god’s sake; she’s not good with numbers.

But she _is_ good with patterns, she tells herself. And it’s the patterns that she needs to look into. Property values, funding transfers, purchases and sales, all of it is like colors on an artist’s palette. (She opens Leland Owlsley’s laptop again, and finds that it’s dead. Her own laptop cord fits, though.) Match the numbers, match the pattern. Find the answer.

She has to find the answer before they run out of time.

_I will not be the one to have ruined it all._

Vanessa pushes her hair back out of her face, peels off her heels, and gets to work.

.

.

.

“So, we get the Goodmans to roll over, find Hoffman, and we’re done?”

“That’s what it looks like,” Darcy says to no one, tugging at her skirt in the hospital bathroom. No one else is in here, otherwise she’d feel very conspicuous, talking to herself. Or to the little waxy bulb in her ear that Kate had presented her with upon learning that they were “going undercover.” (Kate’s words, not hers, though she supposes they’re not entirely wrong.) It’s at least a hell of a lot more comfortable than the one she used in Daily Daze, simply because Kate has the luxury of having money to throw away on this shit. The little plastic piece that’s supposed to register her speech tickles underneath the cover-up, though.

“That simple?” There’s a pop from the other end. Kate’s chewing gum, she thinks. “For serious?”

“I mean, it’s not like it’s simple.” She checks her make-up again, wondering if she ought to have darkened her cheekbones more. Hospitals don’t have surveillance cameras the same way Daily Daze does, and Karen (coached by Marci over the phone, which was possibly the most splendidly snarky conversation she has ever had to overhear) has already hacked into the system remotely and told her where she needs to keep her head down, but she can’t depend on the nurses not being able to recite her looks verbatim to the cops. If the cops get called. Not to mention the fact that there are still two policemen outside of Rich Goodman’s hospital room. (She’d have taken the fire escape, if it hadn’t been six windows past the one she needed to open. Thanks, Our Lady of Mercy.) “We have to track down someone who can track down someone who can give us a direction to _maybe_ find Hoffman, which means a lot of legwork and a lot of staring at Silver and Brent paperwork.”

“Still,” says Kate. If she’s where she’s supposed to be, she’s perched on the building across the street, arrow at the ready. “It feels super simple. Like…too simple. Find this one guy and it all fits together, we can finish this?”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Katie-Kate.” But she knows exactly what Kate means, that creeping sense that this is wrong, that something’s going to happen to fuck it up, because that’s what always happens with them. Something always fucks it up. A Fisk shows up, a Wesley dies. A Nobu hurts someone, a Goodman makes a threat. Someone lies. Someone bleeds. She closes her eyes for a moment, trying hard to keep her breathing steady. They’re not lucky enough to get a break like this. Every step makes her feel like the floor’s going to fall away from her, and there’s nothing underneath.

Kate pops her gum, and the sound makes Darcy jump. “I told you, call me Hawkingbird.”

“I told you Hawkingbird’s dorky, didn’t I?”

“Better than _man in the mask,_ ” says Kate. Darcy opens her mouth, and closes it again. “God, Susan’s gonna kill me if she ever hears about this.”

“Who the fuck is Susan?”

“My sister. She lives abroad. Don’t talk to her much anymore.” Kate sighs, and it gusts like a hurricane over the too-sensitive comms. “Seriously, though, it—it’s like a deus ex machina. Deus ex Hoffmana?”

“Hashtag that and we’ll be golden.” Darcy checks her reflection in the mirror one last time, and then pushes her sunglasses on. “You have eyes on the breaker?”

“Of course I have eyes on the breaker. It’s a black fucking box on a white building. It’s you I’m waiting on, lady.”

“Keep your Wonder Woman panties on, Hawkingbird, I’m going.” The sunglasses are Foggy’s from Columbia, almost too big for her face, but they hide the color of her eyes, the shape of her cheekbones. Actually, they cover almost as much as her mask does. She tugs on her blonde wig, and then presses her folder to her stomach. Thankfully it's cold enough that she can get away with wearing gloves everywhere. Splints _and_ fingerprints, hidden in one lucky stroke. Her cast vanishes under her sleeve. “Cover me.”

“You know I can’t do that. There are, like, _no_ windows on this fucking floor. You’re lucky I found the right angle to hit the breaker and keep an eye on Goodman’s room, because seriously, nearly impossible. But because I am both brilliant and excellent, I managed it. You seriously should pay me more.”

“Har-de-har-har, Bruce Wayne. Now shut up, I need to move.”

“You don’t tell me what to do. And I told you, I’m Nightwing.” Kate snaps her gum. "Well, for now, anyway."

Darcy rolls her eyes behind her glasses.

Rich Goodman has been given one of the more private rooms in Our Lady of Mercy’s ICU, one without observation windows the nurses could use to peer in at him, and a goddamn glorious view of the city. He’s not in danger of cardiac arrest (honestly, if he’d been less rich, she’s pretty sure they’d have booted him out of here by now) so there won’t be many machines on him to register any changes in his behavior. If his heartbeat gets too fast, it’s possible a nurse will come looking, but Kate already has eyes on the electrics—even with the backup generators, they’re counting on everything being on the fritz. Darcy slips out of the bathroom, letting a nurse with thin braids and a nose ring through the door as she goes, and looks up and down the hallway (no one’s watching her, and the camera’s turned in another direction, all of which is only to the good) before marching right up to the police officers guarding the door. There’s no point in being shy about it. She needs to get into the room, they’re going to be the ones to let her in. Besides, in a minute or two, everything’s going to go to shit, and they’ll be distracted anyway.

“Hi,” she says, and gives them a bright smile. “My name’s Carina Llewellyn, I’m from Landman and Zack. I have some papers for Mr. Goodman?”

“Visiting hours are over, girlie-girl,” says the right-hand cop. He speaks through his nose, almost foreign in the way only the deepest underbelly of Brooklyn can be. “Go home. Come back in the morning.”

“Look, I’m working late, okay? And I need to get these signed tonight, otherwise my ass is grass with my supervisor, and I’m barely holding onto this job as it is. Turns out even the HR department is tight as a fucking owl when it comes to _proper language._ ” She rolls her eyes, and hope they can see the way her eyebrows are bobbing behind her sunglasses. “And on top of that I have an _enormous_ fucking hangover that won’t go away no matter how many Advil I take, so I am not in the mood for this, okay? It’ll seriously take two minutes and then I’ll leave them to the hospital bed or whatever.”

The cops look at each other. One of them’s younger, maybe a few years older than she is, and he’s obviously the one in charge even if the older one has more stars on his shoulder. There’s a puckered scar on his cheek as if he once had someone stick a knife into his face, and it draws her eyes like a car accident. “Which one do you need to talk to?”

“Both of them.” _Might be one of Fisk’s_ , she thinks, because he’s looking at her with hard, flat eyes, like she’s going to draw a gun on him. And yeah, she has her taser in her messenger bag, _and_ the gun she stole from Turk Barrett, but excuse you, _rude._ “Elder or younger?”

“Both, actually. I was told by Mr. Goodman’s secretary that I can probably find him here?” She frets a little with the hem of her shirt. “She hasn’t heard from him in a few days, says he hasn’t really left the hospital. I really hope they’re both here, seriously, I _cannot_ deal with having to hunt all over the city for them right now—”

“You talk too much.” He flaps his hand at her. “Paperwork?”

Thank god for Marci Stahl. Darcy hands over the photocopied Landman and Zack stuff without hesitation, and watches the cop as he pages through it. His badge says his last name is Zaccardi. ID number 231309. She memorizes it, tapping her fingernails against her thigh. Her skirt feels itchy; she hasn’t washed this since her first meeting with the Goodmans. She’s counting on them not remembering how she dressed. “I thought this was already done,” says Zaccardi, and she really, really wants to punch him in the face, because _Jesus Christ_ , stop being so thorough, you asshole. “The DA wasn’t interested in a plea bargain.”

“You know big firms like Landman and Zack. They like everything signed in triplicate and on the dotted line.” She shrugs, lowers her voice. “Seriously, the only reason I’m here is punishment because I drank too much on a weekday and said ‘fuck’ in front of one of the partners, but I have to get it done, otherwise I’m out of a job, and there’s no way any other firm’s gonna hire me if Landman and Zack drops me like a hot potato.” She darts a look at the other cop, who isn’t even paying attention; he’s playing a game on his cell phone. “Please? It’ll only take a few minutes, and then I can go buy like…industrial-strength acetaminophen. Unless you think one of the nurses would be willing to give me something just because I’m super nice, because if my head doesn’t stop hurting in the next hour I will probably kill someone and it will be terrible.”

Zaccardi closes the file, slapping it against his palm a few times. Then he sighs, tight through his nose, and gives it back to her. “Five minutes,” he says, and steps aside. “Don’t talk to them outside of getting the signatures. Rich Goodman’s arm isn’t doing too well, so you may need to help him.”

 _Like hell I’m touching that bozo._ “Thank you,” she says, “thank you, _thank_ you so, so much, you’ve saved my life and my job, seriously—”

“Whatever, just get in there,” he says, and opens the door. Darcy beams at him, and darts through, knocking it shut with her butt. _No prints? No problem._

They’re both there. Richard Goodman is in the bed, lying perpendicular to the windows, eyes closed, heart monitor beeping slowly, contentedly, like he’s worth peace. She might be imagining it, with all she knows about him, but that same sickly, cloying look still clings to him. It’s all poisoned honey and rot beneath the surface, and her guts give a nasty twist at the sight of his bruised face. His arm is in a sling across his chest to keep him from messing with the hole in his shoulder, and the gleam of fresh white gauze beneath his hospital gown catches her eye like blood. _Kate shot him. Kate did that._ And Kate could have killed him, but she didn’t, and she doesn’t plan to if the way she’s avoided the subject is any indication. Darcy can’t hope that she’s part of the reason for that, because it’s like Ben said—if Kate had _wanted_ to kill Rich Goodman, if she had, there’s no way in the world Darcy would blame her for it. Because Darcy wants to. Her palms are sweaty, itching to close around Rich Goodman’s throat.

 _I’m not like Fisk,_ she tells herself, and forces her good hand out of its fist. She’s crumpled the file in her hand. Darcy opens her bag, and shoves the thing inside. _I’m not._

Robert Goodman is sitting in the chair beside him, his hands folded as if he’s praying, eyes closed. He jolts a little when the door shuts, and turns to look at her. The curtains are open, and moonlight and city noises are creeping in through the window. They cast strange patterns over Rich Goodman’s bed. “What?” he says, and he looks just like how she remembers, doughy skin and receding hairline. There’s no flicker of recognition in his eyes, but then again, she’s wearing huge bug-sunglasses and has blonde hair right now, so she wasn’t expecting any. “Who are you?”

“Hawkingbird,” says Darcy, and on the other end of the line, Kate lets out a breath. There’s a flickering, and then the lights go out. There’s a lock on the door, which seems counterintuitive in a hospital like Our Lady of Mercy, but it’s lucky as fuck. Darcy presses her hand against the doorknob, and turns the lock. Outside, she can hear people shouting and running around, but the cops don’t try the door. She draws her taser from her purse, and holds it on Robbie Goodman.

“Try to scream, or shout for help, and you get these prongs in your face.”

Robbie Goodman shoots up out of his chair, hands clenched at his sides. He’s staring at the dead lamp, at her taser, at her face, hidden behind her sunglasses. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he says, and he advances on her like he’s going to intimidate her, this puffy old man with his veiny eyes. He’s nothing compared to Wilson Fisk. Darcy crackles the taser, and he stops suddenly a few feet from her, his eyes getting wide.

“Seriously,” she says. “Just give me an excuse. I would _love_ to make your heart stop.”

Not permanently. Well, maybe a little permanently.

“Did you know you go all Southern when you do this?” Kate asks, curiously. “It’s so _weird._ ”

 _Shut up, Kate._ “Back up,” Darcy snaps, and Robbie Goodman hustles to do what she says. “And get back in your chair. We’re going to have a little talk.”

“Whatever you want, you’re dreaming.” Still, he puts his hands up, slowly, the way the cops tell people to do, and sinks back into his chair again. _Put your hands behind your head_! “Those two cops outside will be in here any minute.”

“No, they really won’t,” she says.

And in the same moment, there’s a series of bangs and shrieks from out in the hallway that has Robbie Goodman plastering his hands over his ears and Rich Goodman snapping out of his nap with a jerk makes him wince, pressing his hand to the hole in his shoulder. He blinks, and stares at them, his father and Darcy Lewis, the taser held between them.

“Holy shit,” he says. “What the fuck’s going on?”

In her ear, Kate cackles. “Oh, look, they run so fast. I _love_ fire-crackers. Do you think we can use fire-crackers for everything?”

“How long do I have?” Darcy asks. Kate blows a raspberry.

“Maybe five minutes at the most. There are only so many I can set off remotely at this angle without losing track of you three.” There’s a shift in her voice, then, a deepening, not in tone but in depth. “Let me know if I can shoot either of them in the back for you.”

Darcy ignores her.

Robbie Goodman raises his hands again. Out in the hallway, she can hear the cops shouting at the nurses. _Get down, get down!_ _Check your six, Zaccardi._ “What is it you want?” says Robbie Goodman. “You want money? Money’s easy. I can write you a check right now.”

“You seriously think everything is about money.” She glances at Rich Goodman, whose hand is creeping for the alert button. “Just try it, Richard. I’m not above shooting you in the eye.”

Her aim isn’t nearly that good, but Rich Goodman doesn’t know that. He knots his fingers in the bedspread, and stares at her as if he wants to rip her throat out with his teeth. “What the fuck do you want, you bitch? Gone to a lot of trouble to get a few minutes alone with us. You could’ve just asked.”

“Aw. So _sweet_ of you to mention that.” She’s burning, burning, burning. She cocks her head. “You have a chance to talk to Mathias lately, Rich? He’s telling some interesting stories about you. Him and all those videos you took. Tell me, are you _actually_ stupid enough to figure your little home video collection wouldn’t hang you, or have you just—never learned how to keep yourself from being an absolute sociopathic fuckwad?”

Rich’s eyes get wide. “You’re that bitch Lilith,” he says. “Lynch told me about you. You’re the one who grabbed him out of Daily Daze.”

“Right in one.” She can see Robbie Goodman shifting in his seat, and turns the taser back on him. “Let’s be _completely_ clear, just so there’s no chance that either of you misunderstand me. I know about Fisk. I know what you do for him. I know how Lynch gets you your girls, Richard, and I know how the triad funnels you drugs. I know that you ship heroin out through Goodman-Okamura, and I have proof. Of all of it. Names, dates, places, photographs. I have witnesses, and confessions. I can _ruin_ you, both of you, in a heartbeat.”

Robbie Goodman swallows. “Bullshit.”

Kate starts whispering in her ear.

“Petyr Belyakov was your main Russian contact,” she says. “Until the Russians turned to smoke, he was the one you worked with when the Chinese would ferry drugs through your company for international export. They called a truce, the Russians and the Japanese, after the murder on the docks, didn’t they? Did you broker that, or someone else?” She doesn’t stop to let him answer. “Your main _Japanese_ contact was Hironobu Orihara, of course, but we all know what happened to him. His right-hand man, Nam Suk Kim, he’s still out there. There are photos of you three meeting, public, private.” She listens again. “Richard, your primary dealer was a blind woman named Yinglu Zhao; she’d meet with you in a coffee shop on 50th and 9th, any time you needed more. Was it your idea to get in bed with the yakuza, Robbie? Seems like it’s been going on since the very first day Goodman-Okamura opened its doors. Not with Orihara, probably, but, oh, _years_ now, if I have a mind to guess.”

Robbie clutches at the arm of his chair, and says nothing.

“Now, with Andromeda Fare, you—” she swings around to Rich again “—you pushed your friend Clark Jenson to get his uncle to help you with that. What was it, a favor for the Chinese after all the drugs they gave you? Give them a car to get the Russian bastards out of the way, maybe point them at a warehouse on the dock where they could clean up after themselves? You think Jenson’s uncle knew what that was all about? What do you want to bet that Matthew Jenson will turn on you the instant he hears it gets him a plea bargain?”

Richard scoffs a little. “None. He knows where to look.”

“Not if Fisk’s gone, he won’t. And Rich, without Fisk, your whole little kingdom comes tumbling right down. You might be a big fish in your itty-bitty pond, but Fisk—Fisk’s on a whole different level. And if he goes down, so do you.”

Robbie Goodman’s getting whiter and whiter, until his lips look like dead slugs in his face. She thinks he might actually faint. “What do you _want_?”

“I want you to turn yourselves in,” says Darcy. “And not to those two idiots out there. They’re both Fisk’s men, and we all know it. No, five minutes after the lights come back on, I want you to get your malingering ass out of that goddamn bed, and I want you to check yourself out of the hospital and walk right out the hospital doors and into the gypsy cab that’s waiting for you on the corner. Driver’s a Sikh. Nice boy. He knows where to take you.” She’s pretty sure that this is _not_ what Ajeet Singh had in mind when he offered Karen help, but he’d agreed even after Karen had gone over the entirety of what they needed him to do, including all the dirty details about Rich Goodman, so he’s ballsier than either she or Karen ever anticipated. “You’re going to go right to the 34th Precinct, and you’re going to turn yourself in to Officer Brigid O’Reilly, badge number 982356. You will not stop. You will not pass go. You will not collect two hundred dollars. You will not speak to Sergeant Oslo; you will not make contact with anyone but Brigid O’Reilly. You will _both_ give me your cell phones, and you will do it now. Because if you don’t, you are not going to enjoy what happens.”

“And what’s that?” Rich’s mouth curls up into a sneer. “You’re going to tase us? Sorry to tell you, sweetheart, but I’m not Lynch. _Nothing_ about you scares me. Besides, MGH never gave me shit, aside from some really, reallythick skin. That little doodad won’t do a damn thing.”

She thinks about drawing the gun, then. Thinks about it, but doesn’t do it. “No, but it’ll work on your dad,” she says. “And Robbie, you—well, you look tired, old man.” Detective Blake is choking in the back of her mind, the stains on the underside of his mattress as Hoffman pressed the plunger on the syringe. “How many shots do you think your dad can take of this before his heart gives out?”

Rich doesn’t react. Robbie, though—Robbie presses a hand to his chest, as if he can already feel the heart attack on its way. “Rich?” he says, but Rich doesn’t take his eyes off Darcy.

“There’s a time limit for this. You’re not in Brigid O’Reilly’s custody in an hour, we’ll drag you there ourselves. And it won’t just be me. You know who my people are. You know who will be coming for you if you don’t do as I say. And my friends, well. They’re not _nearly_ so nice as I am.”

“Prove it,” says Rich Goodman.

“I was really hoping you’d say that,” says Lilith.

The arrows cut through the open window like a knife through fine silk. The first scuffs Robbie Goodman’s cheek as it passes, splitting skin, drawing blood. Before it’s even found purchase in the cheap plywood of the wall, the second flickers into the mattress, right between Rich Goodman’s fingers. He shrieks and yanks his hand back as if it’s been burned, and when she looks, she can see a smear of blood on the blankets. The third arrow comes so close to Rich’s nose that it opens the skin up there, a hair-thin cut that barely bleeds. It sticks, quivering, in the wall, black, unmarked, and—like all the rest—completely clean. No fingerprints, no proof. _God bless latex gloves._

“Do I have your attention, Rich?” she says, and Rich drags his gaze from the arrow to her face. He finally looks unnerved. _Rich doesn’t know I’m in archery,_ Kate had said, and it’s only now that Darcy finally believes it. Rich doesn’t know a damn thing about Kate Bishop, and learning is scaring the shit out of him. “We’ll be following you. We have people watching in the station, people in the streets. You go anywhere, do _anything_ you’re not supposed to, we’ll know, and the next arrow will go right through your throat.” She considers. “Of course, we could just do that _now_. To be entirely honest, it took a while to convince everyone to let you survive. It’d be much easier to just kill you now. Justice, and all that.”

“You don’t kill people.”                                      

“No. The devil doesn’t kill people. Jury’s still out on me.”

Rich and Robbie look at each other. Over the commlink, she hears Kate take a ragged breath, like she’s barely holding herself together. It knocks her back into Darcy again, just for a moment, because _shit._ Then Kate clears her throat, as if nothing’s happened.

“You have less than a minute, dude. I can shoot the breaker again, but I’m pretty sure they’ve already sent people up here after me. I need to get off the roof ASAP.”

“Clock’s ticking, gentlemen,” says Darcy, and unlocks the door without looking at it. “Cell phones. Now.”

There’s a long, terrible moment when she thinks they’re going to turn on her. Rich is shifting back and forth, as if he’d like nothing better than to leap out of his bed and slam her to the wall, hurt her, maybe even rape her, and for a second she’s horribly aware that she’s one woman with a taser (and a gun) faced with two men who could very well do just that, even if it’s a hospital, even if there are people outside, because they’re bigger than her and they could try. Then she remembers Kate, and she steadies herself. Rich doesn’t move, but Robbie—Robbie reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his iPhone.

“Dad, no.”

“Fisk will have us killed if we go to the police,” says Robbie, not taking his eyes off her. “You swear he’ll leave us alone?”

They don’t have Hoffman yet. Still, she nods once. “Fisk won’t touch you.”

“Or my son,” says Robbie, and Rich jerks in his bed.

“ _Dad._ ”

“Neither of you will have to worry about Fisk after tonight,” she says. “Cell phone.”

Robbie gives it to her as if he’s waiting for her to kill him, his eyes still fixed on her taser. He drops it into her bag without looking away, and when she looks at Rich, she sees that the cell phone beside his bed is lit up with a text message. Robbie grabs it, and drops that into the bag too, and she closes it, backing away from both of them. “Right choice,” she says, and turns the knob. “Like I said. Five minutes. If you’re not out in that gypsy cab by then, well. We’ll make you.”

“Jesus Christ, Dad,” says Rich again, but she’s already shutting the door behind her. The nurses don’t notice her. Zaccardi and his friend still haven’t returned, and in the distance, she hears one more fire-cracker go off. _Thank you, Kate Bishop_. Darcy pushes her glasses up her nose, and heads for the emergency stairwell.

She doesn’t stop looking over her shoulder until she meets up with Kate in the café across the street. Kate’s in her thick purple sweatshirt again, hood yanked up over her head and her bow and quiver concealed in a big black duffel bag she has shoved up under the table. Darcy drops down across from her, and pulls her sunglasses off to rub at her eyes. There’s something dark and buzzing in her muscles, rattling her chains. “Hey,” she says, and turns to watch the front doors of the hospital. Ajeet and his gypsy cab are still waiting in the standing zone. “You okay?”

“No,” Kate says shortly, and tucks her chin close to her chest. She’s ordered coffee for both of them, and Darcy wraps her hand around her mug, relishing the warmth in it. The blood left her fingers a long time ago. “Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” says Darcy, and sips at her mocha. It’s not the best coffee shop, but they can at least steam milk decently. She guesses it’ll take twenty minutes, maybe, for the Goodmans to check Rich out of the hospital—usually it takes longer, but hey, they’re rich assholes, they can bully their way out faster than anybody else—and then another five or so for them to get Rich’s shit together and down to the ground, so there’s time to luxuriate. “Sorry,” she says, and there’s still a curve of Atlanta around her vowels. “Forgot you hadn’t seen me like that.”

“Wasn’t you.” Kate sinks deeper into her hoodie. For a time, Darcy thinks she’s not going to say anything else, thinks she’s going to let it go, but then Kate darts a look at her that’s almost frightened. “I could have shot him, you know,” she says. “When I did the thing with the car. I wanted—I wanted them out of the way while I looked into the yakuza, wanted them distracted, but I had the arrow drawn and I thought, _I could kill him._ And I nearly did it.”

Her mouth dries out. Darcy glances around, but no one’s paying attention to them. Kate’s speaking so quietly that even Darcy can barely hear her. She gulps at her coffee, trying to give herself time to think. _You can’t blame her for that._ Not when she wants Fisk dead.

 _We make each other better._ Maybe it’s not just her and Matt. Maybe it’s all of them. She makes Karen better, Karen makes her better. She makes Kate better, Kate makes her better. All of them, too dark on their own, barely creeping into the grey together. She thinks of the World Tree she wrote a paper on in college, Yggdrasil, all the nine realms laid out in its roots and branches, woven together so uniformly that they can’t tell each other apart, even at the seams. “But you didn’t,” she says, when the moment stretches too thin. Kate’s eyes are red. She shudders a little, and looks out the window.

“No,” she says. “I didn’t.”

They leave it there, because there’s nothing else to say.

It only takes fifteen minutes (hey, new record) for the Goodmans to clamber into Ajeet Singh’s cab. Ajeet calls Kate the moment he sees them, and leaves his cell phone on the seat of the shotgun, so they can hear everything that’s going on. “Deus ex Hoffmana,” says Kate again, and though her voice shakes she still sends Darcy a bit of a smirk at her own wit. “Better hope Karen and Marci have pulled through with something, otherwise we just did all that work for nothing.”

“It’s Karen and Marci,” says Darcy. “If anyone can pull a rabbit out of their butts, it’s Karen Page and Marci Stahl. And Foggy,” she adds, because yeah, Foggy’s helping too. _Please, god, let them have pulled a rabbit out of somewhere._ Planting all those fire-crackers without anyone noticing had been a shit-fit and a half. “They’ll have something.”

.

.

.

“So we, officially, have no idea where Detective Hoffman could be.”

Darcy rests her forehead against Claire’s coffee table. She’s not going to cry or anything (though she’s irritated enough that she might have, in another life, in another time, when she hadn’t spent the past three days trying to get over an attempted murder—which, funny story, not really something you get over that fast) but she kind of really wants to throw the banana phone again. Of course, the banana phone is in Matt’s apartment. And Fisk broke her burner phone, so she can’t whack it a few times with the heel of her shoe to get this endless, itchy frustration out of herself. It feels like she’s pulled a muscle somewhere behind her sternum and no matter how hard she rubs she can’t ease the ache. “Great,” she says. “So I could have waited a day to deal with the Goodmans? I still want to shower.”

“No,” says Kate. “No, we couldn’t have waited another day. If we had, they might have—I don’t know. Run off, or something.” Her voice is odd, almost like she’s speaking around an eggshell, trying very hard not to shatter it between her teeth. “The Goodmans had to be dealt with.”

It’s not Darcy but Karen who puts a hand on Kate’s shoulder, reorganizing herself around her coffee and her laptop and her Pisan tower of paperwork to manage it. Kate turns to look at her and covers Karen’s long fingers for a moment before pulling away. It’s a good sign, and Darcy will take it. She’s not above bullying Kate into therapy once all of this is over, but she’ll definitely take it.

“It’s not like we have _no_ idea,” says Foggy, but even he sounds doubtful. “I mean, we know where he’s probably _not_. Which is good. Narrowing things down is good.”

“And we still don’t have anything more from Marci?”

“Hey, it’s like one in the morning, okay?” Foggy leans his head back against Claire’s couch, pinching at the bridge of his nose. “I’m just—there are only so many hours she can put in at that place before people start to get suspicious, and Marci grabbed a _lot_ today.”

“No, I know.” She had. Foggy had come back with nearly a hundred pages of paperwork under his arm, because Marci, as a junior member of L and Z (as well as being a woman with large breasts, the pain of which can only be understood by other busty peoples), had been sent to the printer room to make approximately a million photocopies, and she’d snuck some Fisk files into the mix. “I just—it’s so hard to think that there’s so much here and none of it actually means anything.”

“It’s not like it’s meaningless.” Karen slips her pen behind her ear, and goes back to typing. Her coffee mug is only just barely balanced on the arm of the chair. Darcy leans around Kate and rescues it before it hits the floor. “Foggy’s right, it means that we know where Hoffman’s not. And the Goodmans being in custody, that’s good too, because at least they can start talking.”

“They haven’t yet, that’s the thing,” says Darcy. “Brigid can hold them for twenty-four hours without officially charging them, but she says Robbie Goodman is refusing to talk until they have proof that Fisk isn’t coming after them. Which can only _happen_ if Hoffman starts talking, which can’t, because we don’t have Hoffman.”

Foggy stares hard at the ceiling. “Jesus Christ, this is what going insane feels like. We can’t keep doing this over and over.”

“Yes, Foggy, we _know_ ,” Darcy snaps, and then lifts her head to knock it against the table. “God. Sorry. That was bitchy.”

Foggy flaps a hand. “You’re sure Matt doesn’t have anything?”

“I’m sure that Matt’s not here, and that’s pretty much all I’m sure of.” He’d said something about talking to some of Owlsley’s other people, though how he’d differentiate them from Fisk’s people in general, she has no idea. Maybe they all smell like feathers. Maybe by ‘Owlsley’s people,’ he’d meant ‘owl people,’ and she would not be surprised in the slightest if there were human-owl hybrids in this city. Darcy tugs a file marked _property values 2014_ towards herself, and opens it up again. Someone’s highlighted it with pink, which means it was probably Foggy who looked at this one last. “I should probably call and check on him, it’s been about half an hour.”

“Wait another ten minutes, just in case.” She’s honestly not sure which of them worries more about Matt when he’s out on his own, now, her or Foggy. “Why are you looking at that one again? It’s old.”

“Old things are good things.” She’s looking at it because she has nothing else to look at, and maybe if she stares at numbers she’ll sleep for a while. At least until she wakes up crying. “Why the hell is Silver and Brent buying so many weird properties, anyway? They’re a financial group, not a trading conglomerate. Or a real estate agency.”

“Tell that to Silver and Brent,” says Karen. “I’ve been looking over their property listings all day. It’s like they’re trying really, really hard to buy up as much of the city as possible as quickly as they can, and I really can’t help but wonder if it’s another Fisk thing.”

Fisk, owning half the city? Or even a third? That’s a terrifying prospect. “Okay.” Darcy presses her back against the couch, and closes her eyes for a moment. She can’t work out if she needs more coffee or more water, but she doesn’t want to try and figure it out. Either way, her head is pounding. “Okay, do you have another property value file on there?”

“I don’t know, maybe.” Karen sucks her teeth. “I mean, I can’t exactly hack Landman and Zack, y’know. I’m decent but I’m not a miracle-worker.”

“No, I know. I was just—I know Marci dropped off a USB stick, too, so I was wondering if there was anything on that.”

Karen makes a noise that sounds more like _mrrr_ than anything, and sweeps her wireless mouse around. “Sort of. It’s not—it’s not property values, but it’s a listing of their holdings. Does that work?”

“Whatever, close enough. Read them off.”

Everything matches, for the most part. They read each page twice, because Karen’s convinced they’re missing something, but Darcy’s eyes are crossing. By the time they hit page five, she begs out, and gives it to Foggy to keep going. Kate’s going over a file as thick as her index finger that’s so full of numbers Darcy hadn’t even tried (she’s not a numbers girl, okay), and her eyebrows are clenched tight enough that it looks like they’re trying to become one creature. She rests her fingers on Kate’s scalp for a moment before heaving the window open, and clambering out onto the fire escape.

It’s clean and clear, tonight. The restaurant at the end of the block is dark, but she can still smell shawarma and gyro sauce from the Mediterranean place a few buildings down, hanging in the air. Darcy pokes her legs through the bars and lets them swing, hating and loving the way the cool air feels against her blisters. She’s not going to get any sleep until this is done. She knows it. She’s pretty sure all of them know it. She doesn’t want to sleep, anyway; sleeping brings Fisk, brings Nobu, brings Eli, brings blood. A dead and dying Matt, a dead and dying team. Because that’s what they are, now, a team, and isn’t that a thought, terrifying and exhilarating all at once. _Who’d have thought that three lawyers, a secretary, and a socialite would turn into this?_

If she sleeps, she’ll fall apart. If she stops, she’ll fall apart. She just wants to wind back time, wants to let herself fade; she wants to forget, and in the forgetting make herself anew. But that’s a lie too, because there are parts of this, most of it, really, that she can’t bear to lose. ( _Kate. Karen. Foggy. Matt._ ) The truth shared between them all, finally heard. The sheer intensity of it almost frightens her. For some reason, she thinks of her first few hours post-Eduardo, Foggy and Matt showing up on her doorstep with ice cream and alcohol and not once asking what happened, just being there because she needed them. They’d shifted from _her friends_ to just _hers,_ in that moment, and without her noticing it’s happened again. These people have gone from _her allies_ and _her coworkers_ and _her client_ to just plain _hers,_ and she’d feel greedy for it if she’d had room inside her for anything other than the rightness of it. She doesn’t own them, but they’re hers nonetheless, and she can’t help but wonder if other people feel like this, if there’s this sense of _mine_ and _not mine_ , if that’s what anthropologists and psychologists mean when they talk about _tribal instinct_ and _clan cultures_ and _social groupings._ Maybe it’s human nature, or maybe it’s just hers, but she likes being programmed this way, and she’ll gladly deal with all of the bullshit evolution has thrown her way in order to be able to keep this.

She hears Matt before she sees him, the scuff of his boots on the roof (because she’s been listening harder to things lately, trying harder, wondering how much of the world she misses because she’s just not paying attention) and the soft ring of the metal as he goes hand over hand down the ladder. She turns her face up to him when he hits the third floor, and doesn’t say anything. Matt rests his hand against the back of her head, and then sits down next to her, the way he used to when they were on her fire escape, at her and Jen’s apartment, back when everything was so much simpler and so much more complicated. “Hey.”

“Hi.” She glances back over her shoulder into the living room, but nobody else has noticed. Matt’s kind of hidden between the windows. “Any news?”

“Lots of different trails. Most of them are cold.” Darcy draws her legs back up underneath her, and pushes her foot into his knee, just hard enough that he feels it. (Though of course he’d feel it if she barely even touched him, feel the air currents or the temperature changes or the grating shifting under them or whatever else, but it’s the intention that matters.) “Barrett was right when he said most of Owlsley’s men have gone to ground. I only found one, and he didn’t know anything worth knowing. What happened with the Goodmans?”

“Kate did well. I was worried I might have to talk her down from shooting Rich in the face, but she didn’t even finch.” The tiny fallout after…that’s something that can wait until later. “I was just about to call you. I thought you’d be out until dawn.”

“I’m just checking in,” he says, and Darcy leans her shoulder into him. Matt turns his face to her temple. A faint breeze makes the thin hair on the back of her neck stand at attention, makes goosebumps rise under her sweatshirt. “I was passing, wanted to see if you had any new leads.”

She feels a bit like they’re dancing around danger, still. Snapped about, sheets on a laundry line. Everything they have seems to be laced through with a wicked kind of whiplash—yesterday morning, Daily Daze, the alleyway by Metro-General, the devil slinking into her bedroom with cuts and bruises and the sudden, pounding awareness that he lied to her, that he’s always been lying to her. She’s not angry with him anymore, she realizes, and when she prods at the places where the rage used to linger, they come up empty and warm. Whatever hurt, whatever fury she’s been clinging to, it’s all faded away without her even realizing it. She hasn’t forgiven him, but she’s not angry anymore, and it makes things easier. Darcy closes her eyes, and tips her head onto his shoulder, and Matt strokes her spine with his fingertips. She’s starting to get used to how it feels to be touched by gloved hands. “No new leads,” she says, finally. “Unless they came up with something in the ten minutes I’ve been outside.”

He lets out a breath. “I think you would have noticed.”

“I don’t know. I thought about bringing Velma out here, getting some iPod time.” But her head’s already careening around with everything else she has shoved into it, and for once she’d felt like music would just make it worse. Amping everything up, rather than blotting it all out. “The Goodmans are holding off on talking until they know Fisk isn’t going to come after them. I hate them, but I can’t blame them. Even with all of Fisk’s men out looking for Owlsley and Hoffman, there’s a good chance they’ll end up dead before tomorrow night.” Still, even if they don’t have Hoffman, even if they don’t have Fisk, they have the Goodmans, and that’s its own sort of triumph. Something to be proud of. She lets herself bask in it for a minute or two before reality sinks back in. “I want this to be over.”

“We find Hoffman, it will be.”

“I don’t know. I feel like it’s just always going to be there. Everything with—with Kate and Karen and me, and what happened with you and Foggy, none of that’s going to change when we get Hoffman. It just means Fisk will be put away.” Because Hoffman has to be enough. He has to be. She thinks of the pop of a syringe in an IV, of shiny shoes and marinara and the dust underneath Blake’s hospital bed. “God, I can’t believe everything is resting on _Hoffman._ He was right there, Matt. We could have grabbed him and all of this would have been over so much earlier.”

“We didn’t know then.” Matt nudges his elbow against hers, and she’s not sure if it’s intentional or not. “And even if we had there wouldn’t have been any way to get him out of there before Brett came in. It would have been impossible.”

“No, I know. It’s just—it’s that hindsight thing, you know? Sucks ass, but it’s true. You look back at all your fuck-ups, you always do it with twenty-twenty vision.”

“That’s never been my experience,” he says, dry, and she turns her face into his shoulder and bites him. There’s still a little bit of Lilith on the surface right now, creeping out of her in her frustration, and she should know that it’ll spark something she’s not certain either of them can handle at the moment, but she can’t bring herself to regret it. The noise Matt makes is more than enough of a reward for getting a mouthful of cloth which has definitely seen better days.

“You bit me,” says Matt, and she props her chin up against his arm, her lips twitching.

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“Do that again and I’ll bite you back,” Matt says, and there’s a hint of the devil in his voice that makes her breathing catch. Jesus Christ, this is _not_ the time to be thinking about this, but now she just _really_ wants to touch him. And it’s so fucking dangerous, because Foggy and Karen and Kate are _right there_ , and Claire is asleep beyond the next window, but she’s just so tired and she can’t think and her whole brain is on fire and it’s like she can feel his words inside her chest, reverberating.

Darcy presses her mouth to his shoulder again, and says, “Promise?”

Matt lets his lips part, taking a breath like he’s scenting the air. She’s absolutely certain he can smell something, hear the way her breathing’s changed, because this time when he peels off his gloves he weaves his fingers into her hair tight enough that it tugs, if only a little. It’s like that moment after Daily Daze, the scrape of teeth against her mouth, giving no quarter. A touch of darkness, of violence, of greed. Her skin prickles. 

“I’m supposed to be working,” he tells her, and when did he get close enough that she can taste his breath on her mouth? Darcy lifts her chin, pushing the tip of her nose against his, and the mask tickles against her skin. Which should not be hot, but is. Goddammit, Matt Murdock is a fucking menace.

“So am I.” She wants his mouth, very badly. Also his hands. She’s not entirely certain which she wants more. She should be worried about how fast the air’s changed, about how charged it is now, how distracting he is, but she’s not. She doesn’t care in the slightest, and maybe this is what Foggy meant when he’d said _tension_ , because she knows how it shifted and she knows when it happened, but she’s not really sure it wasn’t always this way. “You’re distracting me.”

He hums, deep in his ribs, and she feels it fluttering against her palm. And when did she put her hand there, anyway? She doesn’t remember. “Really.”

“The worst distraction,” she tells him, but she can feel the scuff of his skin against her lips as she talks, warm and a bit salty from sweat, and it’s very hard to make her mouth do the talking thing right now. “You’re a bad influence.”

His other hand contorts against her knee, and yeah, she can’t remember that happening, either. He’s drawing slow circles against her skin, creeping beneath the hem of her skirt. He likes touching her, and she can’t explain how much she loves it, because Matt doesn’t touch people. Matt doesn’t leave himself open to touching, except for her. And she _loves_ that. “And you’re a hypocrite.”

“Hm.” She sets her thumb to the dip at the base of his throat, just for a moment. Then she gives in, and hooks her fingers into the collar of his shirt, tugging it down just enough that she can set her mouth against his skin. She can feel his breathing catch against her tongue when she rests the very tip of it against the knob of his right clavicle. She wants to learn the architecture of him, memorize the design. It’s all high sweeping arches, curves and angles meshing, a miracle of evolution. Muscle and sinew and skin, organs and arteries and bones, each piece building a part of the whole, and if she could ever believe in a god then she’d want to thank them just for this, for building the human body this way, because she can’t imagine anything more beautiful right now.

“You’re picking a fight,” Matt says, low and hoarse. It’s that lovely foreign tone, the one she barely knows, and she wants to hear more of it. She touches her teeth to the tendon in his throat, and his hand twists tighter into her hair, only enough that she can feel it, not enough to hurt.

“Well.” She shifts her fingers underneath his collar, tugs it down again, slipping her hand inside to rest her palm flat against the valley underneath his collarbone. She wants to trace every line and scar and joint in him with her mouth, because it’s the only way she’s going to really learn. “I mean, we _did_ miss our first training date.”

The undercurrent is the current, now, dragging them both along, and fuck control. She’s more than half-tempted to let it. Matt follows her hairline with his nose, pressing his mouth to her ear, and the mix of heat and damp and movement makes her shiver. “Don’t start fights you can’t finish. First rule.”

Darcy smiles against his throat. She draws her hand away from his chest, resting her fingers dangerously high on his thigh. “So what’s the second rule?”

“Don’t stop,” Matt says. “No matter what they try to do, don’t ever stop fighting.”

She’s not sure which of them moves first, but suddenly they collide. It’s strange kissing him with the mask still in place, with the cloth tickling her nose, and it keeps her from tugging on his hair the way she wants to, but she makes do. Darcy heaves herself up onto her knees, drawing her fingernails over the planes of his stomach, and she’s not entirely sure when she managed to get her hand up beneath his shirt, but it doesn’t matter, because she wants to map him out with her tongue, mark out constellations in bruises and scars. She finds the edge of the tape of his bandage, and scratches just beneath it, and Matt actually _purrs_ , something curling and growling and deep. She digs in hard enough with her nails that she has to leave a mark, and she wants to find it later, she makes a mental note, but then Matt sets his teeth into her lower lip and she’s melting, she can’t breathe, her insides are too big for her outsides and she doesn’t want to stop. Darcy clenches her hand into the line of his waist, and this time it’s _his_ hands on _her_ skin, rucking up her sweatshirt and her tank top, and the swipe of his thumb along the underside of her breast, barely beneath her bra, scorches like a sin. She wouldn’t be surprised if every touch leaves a mark on her body, a tattoo. _Matt Murdock did this_ , here and here and here, the line of her ribs and the knobs in her spine, the arcs of her shoulder blades and the curve of her hip, and she wants him to _touch_ her, goddammit, it doesn’t matter where, she just wants the full press of his hand against her instead of this light, ghosting trace of fingertips, and she digs her teeth into his lower lip in a warning. _Quit this shit._ Matt lets out a panting breath, and then his tongue is drawing a line along the vein in her throat, and she fists her hand in the collar of his shirt. She wants to throw her leg over him and push him back, wants to let him fight her, because _this_ is a fight she can get behind, one she’d be willing to never let finish, and when he mouths at the underside of her jaw, rasping over the bone, Darcy lets out a little noise that she didn’t think she’d ever be able to make, almost a mew, and she wants, she wants, she _wants_ —

“Oh my god,” says Karen from inside, and it’s loud enough to send pots and pans crashing in her head. Matt eases back, but he doesn’t stop; he rests his mouth over her pulse, to feel the way it beats, and she scratches a line down the nape of his neck with her thumbnail. “Oh my _god._ Holy _shit_. Darcy!”

 _Why is it always Karen,_ she thinks, but she must have said it aloud, because Matt laughs against her throat, dark and rolling. “I’ll be right there,” she says, and if her voice cracks, nobody inside says anything about it. Matt’s still scuffing little patterns over her spine, figure eights and perfect circles marked out with his thumbnail. “And this is how I die. Sexual frustration.”

“When this is over,” he says, as if there’s no question that it’s going to be over, as if there’s no way they can fail, “we’re going somewhere she won’t be able to interrupt. No phones—” he touches his mouth to her throat again, to the soft spot beneath her jaw that makes her toes curl in the chilly air, and she scratches at him with her fingernails, pushing, pulling, leaning “—no computers, nothing. And we’re not leaving until I’m _absolutely certain_ I know every sound you can make.”

Her lungs stop and start again. She digs her fingers into the back of the stupid mask and she presses her open mouth to his, consuming. Her whole body is on fire, struck by lightning, tossed by waves. She wants to kiss him until she can’t taste anything but Matt Murdock in her mouth, until her lungs burn and her lips are numb and she can’t even speak because she’s so, so gone, the whole of her vanished into a black hole of sensation. She raises herself onto her knees and kisses him, one, two, three, six, and then she pulls back. “Don’t start a fight you can’t finish.”

“ _Darcy_!”

Matt presses his palms to her cheeks and kisses her once, hard enough that their teeth clack together, hard enough that her head spins. “Go,” he says. “Now, or neither of us are going inside at all.”

She’s certain she looks nothing like she did when she went outside—for Christ’s sake, her hair’s a mess, there are little red marks where he’d used his teeth, and she knows for a fact that there’ll be patches of raw skin where his stubble has scraped, but she lifts her fingers to his swollen mouth and congratulates herself a little. “Are you coming in?”

“Mm.” He catches her hand, pressing his lips to her palm, lingering. It’s a mix of tenderness and something rawer than that, something more real, and she can feel heat rising from her chest to her collar to her throat and up into her cheeks. “They’re looking for you.”

“No, shut up, they’re not,” she says, because it’s really sounding better to just stay out here and neck like teenagers, but then Kate says, “Darcy, Jesus Christ, get in here,” and she closes their eyes. “Fucking _Christ,_ I’m going to kill them.”

“Give me a minute,” Matt says, and it’s so matter-of-fact that she has to grin at him. She dips her eyes to his crotch, but it’s too dark, she can’t quite see, and if she reaches out she knows for a fact that they’ll both be arrested for public indecency.

“Oh, really.”

“Go _away_.” He pushes at her, just a little, half-laughing even as his fingers curl into her sleeves. “I’ll listen from out here.”

“Asshole.”

“I told you, I can neither confirm nor deny.”

“ _Darcy_ ,” says Foggy, poking his head out the window, and then he stops dead. “Oh,” he says. “Hey, Matt.” His eyes widen, then narrow. “Wait a hot-damn minute—”

“Shut up, Foggy,” Darcy says, and shoves at him so she can clamber back through into Claire’s living room. Foggy’s grin could swallow the sun, if he really tried. All Cheshire and teeth. “Please tell me the world is ending and/or Fisk has suffered a sudden, debilitating, quite probably deadly stroke.”

“Neither,” says Kate, without looking up from her papers. “But it’s almost as good.”

Karen looks so frazzled that her hair ought to be frizzing. “We were going through the property listings, and—holy shit, what the hell happened to you?”

“Don’t you say a word,” Darcy says to Foggy, but he dances back out of her reach and says, “Tropical Storm Murdock has arrived. Carry on, Page.”

For a second, Darcy thinks Karen might snap at her. And yeah, it’s probably deserved, because they’ve been working their asses off all day and Darcy sneaks out for an (admittedly) unexpected make-out session, but then the energy that’s buzzing off her takes over. She waves one hand. “Whatever. There’s a fucking _address_. It could be a typo, but we were going over the listings, and there’s a building that’s missing, a missing property that was never sold or traded or anything else we could find, and it’s in the Kitchen, Darcy, it’s only—”

“Where,” says Matt from outside. Karen jumps, but looks down at her computer again, her eyes darting back and forth. Kate beats her to it.

“51st and 10th, that beat-up old building that’s been under construction for months.”

“Union Allied,” Karen adds, her lips thinning. “Which surprises no one.”

It’s as if someone’s thrown Arctic seawater right in her face, and the sting snaps her out of her daze. Darcy doesn’t bother with her wig. She yanks her boots on, shoves her taser back into the holster on her thigh, and snatches the mask off of the coffee table. Barrett’s gun is still in her bag, but she doesn’t want that with her. Not for this. “Foggy, gimme your phone.”

“What? No. You’ve gone apeshit on your last two phones.”

“On _one_ of them.” She grabs his shoulder, digs her hand into his back pocket—“ _whoa_ , okay, personal space violated, I am violated”—and turns his phone on silent before tucking it under the strap of her bra. “I need this.”

“No you _don’t_ ,” Foggy says, but she’s already kissed his cheek and darted out of reach, fixing her mask, pulling her hood up over her hair.

“Hey, if Matt and I get separated I need to be able to contact him somehow.” She crouches just outside the window, looking at them all. Kate’s halfway on her feet, awkwardly balanced with one hand on the sofa cushions. Foggy has one hand raised. Karen just _looks_ , her pen drooping down from behind her ear and her hands still on her computer keyboard.

“Every half an hour,” she says. “We’ll call every half an hour.”

Foggy closes his mouth with a snap. “Be safe,” Karen says, and Kate sinks back down the floor. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“We’ll call with news,” says Darcy, and heaves herself up the ladder.

It’s a violation of six different building codes and four laws of city construction that she can come up with off the top of her head that the Union Allied signs are still up on this building, but it also feels like something out of a storybook, some epic poem or fanciful fairy tale. _It ends where it started_ , she thinks, as she drops the last few feet down onto the ground and follows Matt through the shadows across the street. All of this began with Union Allied, and now it might finish with it, the scandal that brought them Karen, dragged Fisk out of the shadows. She can’t keep her heart from pounding in her throat, can’t stop herself from shaking a little as Matt heads unerringly for a torn section of the chain-link, lifting it up and away. “Stay behind me,” he says, as he slithers through after her. “We don’t know how many guards he’ll have.”

“Or if he’s even here,” she adds, because she’s filled with so much hope she can’t fucking help it. She keeps her hand tight around her taser, trying to ease the trembling.

“Someone’s here,” Matt says, but that’s all he’ll say.

The back door is open, and the moonlight gleams over fresh boot prints in the plaster dust. It’s like Elena’s apartment, in here. The walls gape like open wounds, and plastic sheeting hangs over the shattered windows. When Matt scuffs his boot over the concrete floor, she hears something skittering, and a rat flashes in the corner of her eye. Darcy presses her lips tight together. “This is pleasant.”

“Three heartbeats.” Matt touches his gloved fingertips to the wall. They come away smeared with white. Plaster dust and ash. “There should be a fourth, but he’s not here right now. He’s the one who comes down here to smoke.”

And now that he says it, she can catch just a hint of cigarette smoke underneath the garbage, the glue, the swollen, rotting wood. “Only three?”

“Two armed,” he adds, and she has _no_ idea how he can pick that up. _Scent? Sound? Does he hear a bullet in the chamber, smell gunpowder and metal?_  Then he points. “They’re just up there, and they’re not being quiet.”

She looks up at the ceiling (it’s raw, the beams showing through dark and foul, like the whole place is going to come down). “I can’t hear them.”

“They’re not being quiet to me,” Matt amends, and starts for one of the plastic sheets. Another rat scrambles out of the way. Someone’s been leaving garbage bags of take-out food down here. The rats have ripped the plastic apart, and she can count enough take-out cartons for a week, two weeks, maybe a little more. “The third one’s strange. Lying down. Heart’s erratic.”

“Is he scared?”

Matt’s mouth tightens. He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I think—I think he’s dying.”

“You think Hoffman’s _dying_?”

“It’s not Hoffman. Wrong weight.” He pulls the plastic sheet down, pushing it out of the way. There’s a door hidden just behind it, shut but not locked, and when he tugs it open, there’s yellowish light spilling onto the landing at the top of the stairs. The hinges are greased and the stairs are swept clean. Someone’s been through here. “Come on,” Matt says, and she sets her hand to the wall and follows. She flinches every time a step creaks under her weight.

The building’s shaped like an _L_ on this floor, and the landing is at the right angle between the two limbs. There’s more plastic sheeting up here, hanging in layers like onion skin, and Matt presses her shoulder back into the wall before he slips off into the darker parts. There are soft male voices coming through the sheeting, but she can’t make out the words. The rhythm of it is strange, reminds her of tourists in Times Square, chefs behind the counter in food carts. _Chinese._ Is this a Triad house? Darcy looks back down the stairs—it’s too open up here, too obvious—and then slips out to press her back against the wall just beside the door frame. If anybody pushes past the plastic, she’ll be as obvious as a bloodstain, but no one coming up the stairs will know she’s there at all.

If it’s the Triad here, maybe Owlsley has deeper ties with the drug runners than they thought. (Cloth catches on plastic, and through the sheets she can see a flash of black, a twist of the wrist. Someone shouts.) That, or there’s someone here that they weren’t meant to stumble on, a very much _not Hoffman_ someone, and she’s torn between screaming and sighing, because it’s good that they’ve found them, but very, very bad that this person—whoever they are, whoever this dying person is—isn’t Detective Hoffman. (A crack of bone, a crash as a body hits something heavy and wooden, and she wants to dart forward, to check, but she can still hear fighting and she knows Matt will kill her if she sticks her nose into it.) _But if it’s not Hoffman_ —

No, that’s not possible. Owlsley’s probably a thousand miles away by now. Someone else. It has to be someone else. Has to be.

She hears footsteps on the stairs in the same moment there’s a howl from one of the guards, and a gun goes off. Darcy jumps, and presses her taser close against her chest. Whoever’s on the stairs, they’re taking them two at a time, and she can’t quite remember how many there were but the noise is coming closer, she can hear someone swearing, and then— _there, there_ —there’s a dark figure in the door frame. She jams the taser into the nearest part of them she can reach—ribs, she thinks, she can feel bone under the prongs—and hits the button. With a sudden, twisting jerk, the guard falls to the ground. His eyes are rolling strangely underneath the lids. The fight’s ended, and now that she’s listening for it, she can hear a strange, randomized beeping sound, the way a heart monitor sounds in TV shows right before someone flatlines. “Lilith,” the devil says, and she pushes the plastic curtains—because they’re curtains, on this floor, not sheets—aside.

It _is_ Owlsley. She knows the glasses, the wrinkles, the suit. It’s crumpled and sweat-stained, but it’s the sort of suit that nobody who doesn’t make fifty-thousand dollars in a week would ever be able to afford. There’s an IV in his arm, his sleeve rolled up over his elbow, and he’s lying flat on his back on a stained mattress with pink foam on his lips. _He’s dying,_ Matt had said, and he looks it. His breathing can’t seem to even out; it’s too shallow, too fast, and when he lifts his head to look at her, he can’t hold himself up for more than a second or two. “Jesus Christ,” he says, and lets his head rock on his neck so he can look at the devil instead. “Fucking figures. Fucking figures she was fucking right.”

“Your heart is failing,” says the devil, quietly, and she genuinely can’t tell if she’s happy or disappointed. Leland Owlsley is a shit, a sociopath and a sexist, but getting him on their side—that would be a tremendous blow, to Fisk, to his whole team. If they could get him to testify. If they could bully him into confessing. It would be a miracle if they could manage it, but if Owlsley’s dying, they have no time to try. “You have a few minutes left, and then you’ll be dead.”

“No fucking shit,” says Owlsley, and coughs. More pink foam erupts from the corner of his lips. “I’ve been sitting here with a fucking fiery anvil in my chest for an hour, I kind of worked that out.” He twists his hand. “Smash the goddamn machine or get out, I’d rather die alone then have you staring at me.”

“I’m calling an ambulance,” Darcy says, but Matt shakes his head.

“Not enough time. He’ll be gone by the time they get here.” Near her foot, one of the guards makes a soft, guttural sound. She steps out of his reach. “They gave him something. I can’t tell what.”

“Goddamn bitch.” Owlsley’s staring at the ceiling. There’s a swollen injection site on the back of his neck, red and puffy. She wonders if that’s the reason for this, for the shrunken old man lying on a dirty mattress in a broken building in Hell’s Kitchen. “Didn’t even have the fucking decency to give me the same stuff she tried on Marianna. No, I’d have died too fast for her tastes if she’d done that. Psychotic old goblin hag-bitch.” He turns his head towards Darcy, scowling. “You could at least _try_ the ambulance. It’s not like I want to be dead in five minutes.”

“They wouldn’t be able to stop it.” Matt pulls the sensor from Owlsley’s forefinger. Darcy has to be the one to push the off-button on the monitor, because Matt can’t seem to bring himself to do it. “Whatever they gave you, it’s been in your blood too long. You stink of it.”

“Thanks.” Owlsley glares. “Nice to know I stink of fucking Chinese herbs.”

“Who did this to you?”

“Christ.” Owlsley’s eyes drift shut. He presses his lips tight together, and forces them open again. After a stuttering moment, he focuses hard on Darcy, the devil and Lilith framing a dead man. “Christ, I can’t believe the Lynch kid was fucking right. Who the hell are you supposed to be, anyway?”

“Lilith.” 

“Queen of monsters,” says Owlsley. “Jesus fucking Christ. Everyone needs a fucking pseudonym nowadays. Maybe I would’ve had better luck if I’d put on a stupid mask and called myself _the Owl._ ”

“That,” says Darcy, “would have been fucking stupid.”

He snorts. Then he blinks, slowly, as if he’s surprised himself. “Least you have a sense of humor. None of the fucking rest of you seem to.”

“Owlsley.” Matt presses his hand to the grotty mattress, leaning forward until he’s hanging, almost suspended, over Owlsley’s pale and sweaty face. “You’re dying. You don’t have time for snide remarks. Tell me where Hoffman is.”

“There’s always time for snide remarks.” Owlsley heaves. His back arches. He can’t seem to get enough air. Matt pushes him back down to the bed, and for a second she’s in a hospital room again, and there’s Detective Blake, Matt’s ear close to his mouth, listening. Then Owlsley hacks up red, and closes his eyes. “Jesus _fucking_ Christ. Don’t ever get old.”

“Hoffman, Owlsley. Where is he?”

“Why?” Owlsley peers at him. “You want to ask him on a date? He doesn’t have armor like I did.”

“You know why.” Darcy glances at Matt. Then she puts her hand on Owlsley’s shoulder, not pushing, just resting. His bones feel bird-frail under her palm. “Tell us.”

“Laurel and Hardy here, reporting for duty.” Owlsley giggles. “It’s a fucking farce. All you fucking hero-types are the fucking same. Doesn’t matter so long as you get your man.”

“Owlsley.” Darcy presses her fingers into his shoulder. “Leland. They _killed_ you. You’re dying and you can’t stop it. If you tell us, we can wreck him. He’ll come toppling down and _you’ll_ have done that. You’ll have beaten him from beyond the grave.”

“Christ, you’re dramatic.” He licks his lips, smearing the foam. His eyes catch hers, and hold them. “Fisk was the best option. Best way to succeed. So much better than a casino.”

He’s babbling, and they don’t have much time. Darcy shakes him, lightly. “ _Leland._ Keep your eyes on me. Where did you put Hoffman?”

“They’ll think they have figured it out by now. Too fucking easy.” He giggles, high, manic. His breath catches in his throat. Matt tugs the IV from his elbow, easing his sleeve back down over his arm. “But I’m smarter than they are. Gao took my things but they can’t find anything from those. They can’t get into my programs, they’re locked, and that Vanessa woman’s a fucking art major, she can’t do anything like that. Fucking figures.”

Darcy goes still.

Matt lifts his head, tips it just so. “Someone's coming. _Hoffman_ , Owlsley. Where is he?”

“I’m Owlsley, he’s Hoffman.”

“Leland,” Darcy says again. “What things?”

“Papers,” says Owlsley. “Papers, my computer. Gao was in my car, and she stabbed me in the back, but they won’t be able to change any of it now. All his slush funds are mine. I’ll fucking die with them and they’ll go to my son, all fair and legal, nothing he can fucking do to stop it.” He’s almost manic, now, his eyes rolling back and forth between Lilith and the devil, like he can’t figure out who to watch more closely. “All of it goes to Lee.”

“Gao took your computer?”

“Probably to give to that bitch.” Leland hacks. “Fucking slut has her wrapped around her finger. Stupid fucking biddy. Never let them too close. They’ll see through your ribs and into your secrets.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“She was supposed to _die_ ,” Leland moans. “All the drinks were poisoned. She pushed him too far off track, made him reckless, irresponsible.” He stares hard at Lilith. “You’re gonna do the same for this shit, here. Never met a pretty brunette who couldn’t fuck up a hardworking man.”

“Vanessa Marianna has your computer?”

“I don’t fucking know. How would I know? I’ve been stuck here.” His lungs stutter in his chest. “ _Christ_. This dying thing is for losers.”

 _Vanessa Marianna has his computer._ And Leland Owlsley’s computer—Owlsley was the money-runner, the schemer, the power behind the throne. She can’t even imagine all the evidence that could be on that computer, can’t even comprehend the enormity of what it would mean if the investigation could get their hands on it. “Jesus Christ.”

“Speaking,” Owlsley says.

“Leland,” Matt says, and he’s so quiet, now, his palm pressed to Leland Owlsley’s heart, as if he can keep it beating through touch, through sheer force of will. “Where’s Detective Hoffman?”

“You’re gonna nag me into an early grave.” Owlsley sighs, and for a raw, terrible moment, she thinks he meant it. Then he draws a breath. “I own a building just off the Hudson River Greenway. Warehouse right near the Lincoln Tunnel. Old service tunnel. Blocked off, supposedly. Russians broke through in the basement. Used it for drug running. Borrowed it, after. Buried treasure.”

Matt sighs. He draws his hand away from Owlsley’s chest. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you.”

“Don’t fucking thank me. Nobody’s getting near. Not without me.” His voice is getting fainter. “Said—said not to move him. Not unless I was there. They’ll shoot him. Won’t get close. No one will take him.”

“I’m not no one,” says the devil. “They’re going down, Owlsley. All of them. Fisk, Marianna, all their men. They’re going down because of you.”

“Yeah, and I’ll be dead,” says Owlsley. “What kind of shit deal is that?’

“One you would have made for someone else,” Darcy says, and Leland snorts again.

“Damn fucking straight. I don’t—”

Air scrapes at his throat. He takes one breath, two. He doesn’t take another. His eyes stare out from behind his angular glasses, dimming, and she watches them close with something close to awe. _Yes,_ she tells herself, remembering Blake, remembering the hospital, remembering the alley and the panic and the fear. _Yes. People really do die that fast._

"Men are coming," says Matt. "Six of them. They're Fisk's. We have to go."

Darcy closes Owlsley's eyes with two gloved fingers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if anyone noticed the aside but watch as I casually make Vanessa bisexual. 
> 
> I'm in the midst of building my next TPoW fanmix, focused more on the ladies of TPoW (Kate. Kaaaaaaaren.), and it made me realize that I forgot to mention (I think) that like...two weeks ago the fabulous oriole agnathon made a TPoW collective fanmix! It can be found here: https://play.spotify.com/user/oriole_agathon/playlist/0epC2dR1oTOC0hrr52MsPY
> 
> Seriously, I'm continuously overwhelmed by how much love you guys are giving me for this ridiculous little fic. Like. Damn. I'm just. Y'all are the _best_.
> 
> Now, off to expand the next chapter to something decent, and finish the epilogue! (Also to respond to your comments because AH I LOVE YOU GUYS)


	23. Lilith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for: blood and arrow wounds. If you could read the last chapter where Kate shot people, you'll probably be okay. 
> 
> UGH OH MY GOD I CANNOT BELIEVE I AM POSTING THIS I AM DEAD 
> 
> At least this chapter is only 14k instead of like...25k. 
> 
> I will answer my outstanding reviews tomorrow, because I am brain dead and would like to sleep. 
> 
> Just the epilogue to go. And then smuts, but that's in a separate ficlet, because the scene was getting too long and I am ashamed of myself. 
> 
> Spanish translations at the bottom! Cheers once again to the fabulous missingending for being so wonderful and getting these translations done so freaking quickly, Jesus.

The call comes in from the 15th Precinct too late to be any help, like a sermon from a priest. They take it together, Vanessa sitting at the dining table with her shaking hands pressed against the wood, Wilson standing just beside her, the phone on speaker so they both can hear. It’s one of the minor troopers that Wilson has in his employ, so unimportant that she can’t even remember his name. She only hears a few phrases out of the tangle, through the hive of bees that her mind has become. Pain and shock and fear and fury, all tangling together, have turned her head into a dark, pounding cave, and she can barely make anything out. _Hoffman’s spilling. Goodmans gone. Owlsley’s body. Found. Dead. Gone. They’re coming._ The call ends as unceremoniously as it began, the phone left like a corpse on the tabletop. Wilson says nothing. His hands are granite-still.

“Well,” he says, and then says nothing else. The gauze over his throat looks like a shroud. She can’t think of what to say, either. They look at each other as if they can find the answers in the other person. She reaches up, and Wilson bends to let her touch his cheek.

“Well,” says Vanessa. _We’ll deal with it_ , is what she wants to say. They deal with everything. They dealt with finding Owlsley ( _too little, too late_ ); they dealt with her nearly dying ( _and look how it’s left you, Vanessa, look how weak it’s made you, how soft-hearted and silly you’ve become_ ); they dealt with Francis Lawton and the Japanese and the Russians before them and the stumbling blocks before even that, when she’d realized that Wilson Fisk defied her expectations in so many more ways than she’d ever been able to conceive, that first moment when he’d turned his back and walked away instead of pushing, forcing, prying. _We’ll deal with it_ , she nearly says. What actually comes out of her mouth is, “Where do we go now?”

“There’s still time to put our people in place, with Hoffman.” She can see his mind working, see it ticking away, but there’s an edge of desperation to it that’s never been there before. “We can discredit him. If necessary, there can be an unfortunate accident. It will just have to be appropriately timed. It’s a shame the mask has been so careful lately, he would be a useful scapegoat.”

There’s a sinking feeling in her stomach that tells her this _can’t_ be fixed, that they’ve been outmaneuvered, that there’s nothing they can do. But she says. “All right.”

Wilson eyes her. “You don’t agree.”

“Do you want to hear why?”

He tips his head a little. “If you would like to share.”

“Leland Owlsley is dead,” she says. “The only person who could have given us Hoffman’s location is dead, minutes before the men entered the warehouse.” (And she has pride in that, in how quickly she found Owlsley even if she hadn’t been able to find Hoffman, because she’s passed Iris’s test, and that means she’s not completely useless.) “He wasn’t alone when he died, we could see that in the dust. _Someone_ took out his guards with as much effort as tearing tissue paper, and yes, it could have been the Japanese, but the fact remains that in the same hour Leland’s body was discovered, Hoffman was delivered to the police.”

There’s a tick in his temple, a muscle twitch she wants to sooth with fingers, with lips. She settles for covering his hand with hers. “A traitor?”

“Or the mask.” His jaw clenches. She ignores it. “If the mask had been the one to find Leland, however he managed it, it would explain how quickly Hoffman was turned over to the police. And the mask favors the 15th Precinct. It might be neighborhood loyalty, yes, but it might also be for an explicit reason. A confederate, an ally. Someone to work his agenda from inside.”

“There’s been no evidence of that.”

Vanessa cocks her head right back at him. “It would be what I would have done, gathering the loyalty of one or two officers in the best positions to deliver information. One or two in the media, one or two in the precinct. It’s what _you_ have done, is it not? Albeit on a much larger scale. And the mask—you’ve said it yourself, the mask is a twisted reflection of you. He’s shown a certain sort of wry cunning in what he does. It’s not a theory that I can prove, but it’s one—it’s one that I feel is closer to accurate than not. It would explain the decrease in his—well, the erratic behavior. Having others to ground him, steady him. Don’t you think?”

Wilson says nothing. She bites her lip. “You don’t think I’m right.”

“No.” He turns his hand under hers, curling his fingers delicately around her palm. Wilson draws up the chair beside hers, sits down. He looks…not antsy, exactly, but unsure. It doesn’t hang well on him. “It’s—it’s something else, something Wesley told me when we first met, you and I. He said that it would be nothing more than an insult for me to try to keep you from this part of my life, from my work. That you were the sort of person who could—who could embrace our purpose, and make it your own.”

She blinks. _James Wesley, again._ She wishes that she’d had a chance to know the man better. “I wouldn’t have gone out on that second date with you if I wasn’t absolutely certain I could handle all that came with it,” she tells him. “Though I’m honestly surprised James gathered that.”

“That’s not what I mean.” He lifts her hand to his lips. “You have surprised me. I hope you’ll always surprise me. There’s—there’s something in you, Vanessa, that remains—I thought you were like _Rabbit In A Snowstorm_ , all those shades of white. And you are, but it’s not the white of snow. It doesn’t fade, doesn’t melt. It’s never stained. You’re like white fire. You purify everything you touch, even when you singe or burn or destroy. I think that’s what Wesley meant. He saw it at the very beginning. He had a talent for that, seeing the cores of people. I am not…I was not blessed with that ability, even as a child. I had Wesley to be my eyes, and before him, I had Larks. And now I think—I think I have you. Clear-eyed fire, to keep me grounded. To remind me what I do this for.”

“Wilson,” she says, because her throat is squeezing tight and her eyes hurt and she can’t help but smile. “That’s the loveliest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“You have surprised me,” he says. “At every turn, you have surprised me. I don’t understand how I could have found someone like you.”

“Because you’re a good man, and those around you, we recognize that.” She presses her thumb into his jaw, shaky. “We should leave. Start somewhere new. Rebuild. Take after Tully, go somewhere they’ll never find us.”

“And you would be all right with that?”

“I love this city. I’ve loved it since I was a child, hearing stories from my father. But I would leave it for you.” She smiles, ignoring the way it stings her cheeks. “I would leave anything for you.”

“Vanessa,” he says, and she’s never quite heard him say her name like that before. He’s always unique, in how he speaks, and she adores how she can never quite predict how he’ll enunciate, how every word seems new and fresh in his mouth no matter how many times she’s heard it, but this is different. This is—this is something holy. He reaches out with both hands, touching her hair, the skin just beneath her jaw, lift and touch, light as a moth. “Vanessa.”

“Sir,” says Christian by the door. The moment shatters. “Sir, there are men downstairs. Kristopher says they came with a warrant. They’re on their way up.”

And all of a sudden she’s swallowed in the panic, trapped in a glacier, cracking from the inside out. “Wilson.” They were supposed to have more time. They’re supposed to be together. She’s failed in stopping this, in fixing it. This isn’t supposed to _happen._ “I don’t—”

“Listen to me,” Wilson says, and she does. There’s the clear-eyed white fire part of her that listens no matter what, and she can see the urgency in him, see the way he doesn’t blink, doesn’t look away from her. Panic can wait, if only for a second. “They know they can’t hold me in the city. They’ll know, if they talk to Hoffman, that there are too many of my men in the system, here. They’ll try to ship me elsewhere, to federal custody. I’ve had a plan in place for this for weeks, ever since the Russians failed me. I’ll only be gone for a few hours, Vanessa. And then we can go. Anywhere.”

 _Anywhere._ For a moment, she lets herself believe it. Then the doubts come back. “But what if—”

“No, you must listen.” He swallows. “You are my heart, Vanessa. I won’t leave you. I swear to you. But if I do—if we are separated, then there’s something you must know.” He leans forward, touching his lips to her ear. She can hear the jabber of Christian’s walkie-talkie, shouting over the line. “There is a girl,” he says, low, thrumming. “In Boston. Her name is Maya, Maya Lopez. I’ve raised her since she was a child. I should have told you, and I’m sorry, but I’m sending you to her. She will keep you safe.”

“Wilson,” she says again, because she needs to say it, needs to feel his name on her lips. “I won’t—we have to go, we can still—”

“No, we can’t.” He presses his mouth to her forehead, hard, fast. “You are everything,” he says, and her heart breaks. “You are _everything._ And I won’t let them take you.”

“Wilson, no—”

But then the door opens, there are men, men and guns, men and guns and handcuffs, and all of it cracks apart. In less than a minute, he’s gone, and she’s left behind with a laptop, a name, and shattered pieces inside instead of a soul.

 _Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice_ , Frost says. But she knows how the world ends. It ends with a closed door and fingers being torn from her own. And for just a second, she breaks. She hides her face, and she closes her eyes, and inside she is destroyed. She can’t breathe. She can’t feel anything. Even the pain is gone. She closes her eyes and relishes the darkness, because it means she can pretend she’s sleeping. It means that this could all be a dream.

 _Listen to me, Vanessa,_ her father says. _Silvia Vanessa. Habibti, mio gioiello. You and I, we’re the strongest ones in our family. We have powerful dreams. But you must always remember to never mistake a dream for reality. For dreams are cruel broken things, and reality: reality is the best pain you can ask for._

Vanessa turned her back on Silvio Manfredi a long time ago, but it doesn’t mean his lessons don’t still hold water. So she breaks, and she lets herself scream, but only for that second. Vanessa takes a breath. She makes herself stop, makes herself think. She wishes, abruptly, for a scarf. Vanessa straightens her shoulders, looks out at the empty room again. Leland’s laptop is still on the table. So is Wilson’s phone, with the call that came in too late.

Christian stands beside the table, watching her. “Miss? Are you all right?”

Vanessa looks down at the computer again. She hasn’t shed a tear. She doesn’t know if she can do things like that, without Wilson to be her heart. Because he is, she realizes. She needs him to feel like she’s breathing. She takes a careful mouthful of air, and wonders if it will burn. “Christian,” she says. “Will you look into who is representing Detective Hoffman, please?”

“Don’t have to,” says Christian. Why they’ve left him behind, Vanessa’s not sure. Perhaps they don’t realize how intrinsic Wilson’s men are to his projects. Perhaps Christian is one of those rarities in the business, a man who’s been careful enough to never have anything messy linked to him. She thinks it might be the latter. “It’s the same people who worked with the Page woman. Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis. Goodman’s—what do you call it. Goodman’s stalker.”

“Goodman’s nemesis,” she corrects. She thinks of the origin of the word _nemesis_ , a winged goddess, a harpy. She’d read a poem in college, in one of her classics courses. _Nemesis, winged balancer of life / dark-faced goddess, daughter of Justice_. Lewis had talked about justice, hadn’t she? Before she’d slammed her taser into Wilson’s throat, burned him, hurt him. There is no justice in this. This is the opposite of justice. This is nothing but simple cruelty. “Lewis,” she says. “Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis.”

Which of them pulled the string? Which of them sounded the gong? Which of them can she blame?

“The Goodmans turned themselves in last night, too,” says Christian, and there’s another echoing bang, another nail in the coffin. “Secretly, to a bit-officer at the 34th Precinct. Said that that woman Lilith made them.”

“Lilith.” She tastes it. She’d heard talk of Lilith, from Francis, before he died. They’d thought she’d been a hallucination. Apparently not. “Lilith and the devil.”

“Miss Vanessa?”

“Revenge and retribution.” She rests her palms on the dining table. She can still feel Wilson’s mouth on her forehead, burning. “Nemesis.”

“Are you all right, Miss Vanessa?”

Loyal, insightful James Wesley is dead. Hironobu Orihara is dead. Leland Owlsley is dead, and a traitor. Iris Gao—she’s gone, and cannot help. The Russians are long since rotting, and useless before that. The senator’s arrested, their men are on the run, She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, starbursts of pain sparkling against the dark. She has no one. Wilson—Wilson has been arrested, and even if he gets away, they have no allies left. There’s only her, and she’s frail and broken, and there’s Nemesis on the windowsill, laughing with dark wings spread. _Nemesis or Lilith?_ She’s not sure. She sets her fingers to Leland’s paperwork.

Nelson and Murdock, taking the Healy case. Lewis, working with Bishop, visiting the Goodmans, investigating the Japanese. Lewis, meeting with Urich. Nelson, speaking with Elena Cardenas. Murdock, in her gallery, laughing. Lewis, visiting Wilson’s mother. Nelson, Murdock and Lewis, working with Page. Nelson, Murdock and Lewis, linked to all of them.  

“The lawyers,” she says. “The lawyers are involved in this.”

“Well, yes.”

“No.” She looks up at Christian. “This woman, Lilith. What does she look like?”

“Red hair,” he says. “Hard to tell how tall she is, nobody’s managed to get a good look at her. Lynch said she was pale skinned, white maybe, Hispanic or Asian. Always wears a mask.” Christian huffs. “Didn’t take Lynch seriously at first. He’s constantly high out of his mind. Couldn’t even remember what color her eyes were, he was tripping so hard.”

Red hair. “Not Lewis, then.”

“No, Lewis and Lilith are different. Accents are different, different heights. Lewis had the shit beat out of her—arm’s broken, hand shattered—and Lilith’s fine. All whole. Besides, I heard from Francis—” he doesn’t even glance towards the spot on the carpet where Francis had fallen, the place where his blood had soaked into the floor “—that Lewis—Lewis was a pain in the ass, sure, but she’s a lawyer. Lawyers don’t take the law into their own hands like that.”

She thinks of the burns in Wilson’s throat, the confusion in his face when he’d spoken of Darcy Lewis. _Maybe the law doesn’t do enough. Maybe it’s not good enough. Maybe it’s owned by the wrong people. It’s not made for us. It’s made by the people in power, made so they can stay that way._ Her head is spinning, swirling. “If they didn’t,” she says, “we wouldn’t have made it nearly so far.”

He frowns. “Miss Vanessa?”

“She knows who they are,” she says. “Lewis. Lewis is one of their allies. Whoever they are, whatever they do, she’s followed them. She’s their bitch, their weapon, their—their goddamn guard-dog. The whole firm is involved in it.” The night after Nobu’s death, the night after Wilson had told her everything, he’d said something about Lewis. _Her arms spread wide, like she could save him from me, from the dark. She reminded me of you._ A woman who’d sacrifice her life for someone like the devil isn’t someone to be taken lightly, and even if she’s not Lilith, she’s still a force worthy of reckoning. “Lewis played a part in this?”

“Lewis was the one who uncovered Orihara’s involvement with the Goodmans. Her firm took the Healy case.” He frowns. “Healy was a bastard, but they did a good job getting him off. Wesley used to say they were raw, but talented. Like molten metal.”

“Molten metal can be shaped,” she corrects. “These three seemed to have cast themselves in a mold of their own. And now they’re representing Hoffman.” Hoffman, who’d turned his back on the man who’d made him into a weapon. “They’ve declared their allegiance to the devil and his people. That in and of itself makes them enemies of mine.”

Christian says nothing. He only watches her.

“When we’re settled,” she says, “when—when we’ve left the city, I want you to have someone watch them. The firm. The people in it. I want them observed. They’re the mask’s weak link. If the devil _does_ have allies, it’s them.” And they can’t move against these lawyers right now, don’t dare, not with Wilson in the spotlight and the organization being ripped to shreds. _They’ve won._ The devil and this woman, Lilith, they’ve won, and that means in turn that she and Wilson have lost. She’s not accustomed to losing. “I want to know about them. I want to know their histories, their schedules, their every habit. When we come back, I want to know how to ruin them. What angle to take, what will hurt them most. Their weaknesses, their vulnerabilities. I want to know them all. I want to destroy them the way they’ve tried to destroy us.”

“Yes, Miss Vanessa.”

“Until then,” she says, “I have to pack. Do you know where Wesley kept his files?”

“Yes.”

“Get them for me. All of it, but especially everything he had on Nelson, Murdock and Lewis. I want it. When you learn more about Lilith, who she is, where she came from, I want that too. I want eyes on them. I want to know everything.” She looks at him. “Can you do that for me, Christian?”

He dips his head. “I’d be honored, Miss Vanessa.”

“Good.” She makes herself smile. She feels like ice, inside. “I knew I could count on you, Christian. Now, I need to go back to my apartment to gather my belongings. Would you call Kristopher around, please? I—I just need to rest, for a moment. Get a few things for Wilson, for when he is…extracted from the hands of the police.”

“Of course, Miss Vanessa.” He looks towards the bedroom door. “I’ll be on guard out here. Take as long as you need.”

She’s not an invalid. But she nods anyway, and slips into Wilson’s bedroom. The scent of it nearly breaks her all over again. ( _What if this fails, what if he doesn’t get free, what if he leaves and I can’t be with him, what if—_ ) She puts her things into a bag, puts a few of Wilson’s things inside too even though she knows he can just buy more, and then sits on the edge of the bed.

She keeps Leland’s laptop pressed close against her stomach, a talisman, a hope. She can’t break the encryption yet, but maybe—maybe once she finally does, they can use it. They can get it back again, all of it. Everything they had.

_And Lilith and the devil—they’ll suffer for their crimes._

.

.

.

It ends so suddenly that it’s almost like a heart attack, and she says that knowing full well she watched someone die from heart failure less than three hours ago.

Hoffman’s guards are more of a problem than Hoffman is. They don’t even have to hurt him. Matt and Darcy trail him all the way to the 15th Precinct, all the way to Brett, and watch from the roof across the street as Hoffman slips inside and lets himself be cuffed.

 _It’s done,_ she thinks, and she’s so numb she can barely feel her heart beating, so numb she can’t even breathe. _It’s done. All of it. It’s done._

“It’s done,” Matt says, but his voice is the same sort of hollow that’s ringing inside her chest, and Darcy turns into him, curls around him, holding on.

The first person they tell isn’t Foggy, or Karen, or Kate. It’s not Claire, not Elena, not Ben. It’s Melvin. It’s Darcy’s idea, but Matt goes along with it. Melvin’s awake in his workshop, light shining through beneath the garage door, and this time it’s Darcy that knocks. Melvin blinks slowly at them, his pupils blown wide from the dark. She realizes, then, that the long yard of black cloth is about the same length and width someone would need for a hijab. It shifts and sings like the cloth he’d pinned around her, like the armor that he’s built for them. _A way to protect Betsy_ , she realizes, and her eyes burn for reasons she can’t even begin to name. Because to Melvin, who’d seen women die in hijabs, in niqab, in burqas—that would matter the most to Melvin, that this one be safe. She wonders if Betsy knows what it means, to have cloth like this.

“They’re done,” he says, “if you want them.” But then his gaze darts from Matt to Darcy to Matt again, and his shoulders start to hitch up around his ears. “Something’s happened. What’s happened? You look like something’s happened. Can’t see through the masks, but I can tell. You learn how to tell things, with helmets. Can’t see expressions, but you figure it out. Cues, body language, signals. What’s happened?”

Darcy looks up at Matt. Matt’s the one who promised. Matt’s the one who found Melvin in the first place. Matt looks down at her, just for a moment. Then he reaches out with one hand, and takes Melvin by the elbow.

“You’ll want to sit down,” he says. “It’s good news, Melvin. I promise.”

Melvin doesn’t quite look like he can believe him, but he sits down anyway.

Dawn’s just beginning to break when they get back to Claire’s, and Claire herself is awake and waiting up for them, brewing coffee in her pajamas. “I called in sick,” says Claire, and slings an arm around Darcy’s neck, pulling the hood back from her hair. “I figure it’s a party.”

“We don’t know that they’ll arrest Fisk right away,” Matt says. Darcy tugs off her mask, and sets both it and the satchel Melvin had pressed on her against the back of the couch before wrapping her arms around Claire and holding on. Claire’s soft and sleep-warm, and when she pulls back to search Darcy’s face, she nods once, as if to say— _well done_. And it was well done. For all of them, it was well done. It just feels too _cleanly_ done. It feels like they’re missing something, and she can’t shake it out of her head. “They have to get his statement, and that could take hours, even more before they manage to issue an arrest warrant for—”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” says Foggy, and he scoops Darcy up by the waist and spins. Darcy _shrieks_ , and starts to laugh in spite of herself, whacking at his shoulder with her good hand. “We fucking did it. We fucking _did_ it!”

“To be fair,” says Kate, “Karen and me were the ones who found the address.”

“And Matt and Darcy were the ones who rooted him out, but I dragged Marci into it, without which we would have failed,” says Foggy, not putting Darcy down. She rests her hand on his scalp, because she can, and because it’s soothing. “Also, I was good moral support. Which honestly I am okay with being, because it seems like taking the lead in this sort of thing winds up making you put on a mask.”

Karen and Kate look at each other. Then Karen leans back in her chair. “I’ve felt no inclination so far, but I’ll let you know.”

“I swear to god if you ditch me too I will cry.” He loosens his grip, letting Darcy slide back to the floor. “But seriously, guys. Hoffman’s in custody. Hoffman’s _done._ The Goodmans are _done._ I just—” He looks down at her, and then at Matt. “I feel like we should all be floating away from sheer relief.”

“I’m not going to be relieved until Fisk’s arrested,” says Matt, but his lips are twitching anyway as he pulls the mask off his head. His own satchel from Melvin, one marked and scored on one side with Afghani sand, rests on the barstool beside him, and she can see a hint of red through the zipper at the top. “But there’s—there’s definitely some relief.”

“Damn straight there’s some relief.” Foggy looks down at Darcy. “Coffee?”

“Please.”

“No,” says Claire, and puts her hand to the small of Darcy’s back. “You sleep. _And_ you,” she adds to Matt, because Matt’s rocking back and forth on his feet. Darcy thinks back over the past few days, and can’t remember seeing Matt down for more than an hour at a time. “Neither of you have slept more than three hours at once since you showed up here, and that was three days ago. I’m diagnosing you as deprived, which means get your dumb bruised asses to sleep before I knock you out with a stick.”

“You’re a nurse,” Matt says. “Not a doctor.”

“And I’ll ram my foot so far up your ass you'll taste rubber if you ignore me on this, Murdock.” Claire’s eyebrows snap together. “If it’ll be too loud here, go back to your apartment, but you’re _sleeping_. At least for two REM cycles.”

“We don’t have time for that. If Brett calls—”

“If Brett calls, we’ll wake you.” Foggy glances at Claire, and when he gets a nod from her, straightens his spine a little. “But yeah. Claire’s right. You both need sleep.”

“But—”

“ _Sleep._ ”

So they sleep. Darcy stays in Claire’s bed, and Matt’s on the floor (because as much as she wants to throw an arm over his waist and listen to him breathing, she shies away from doing it in Claire’s apartment, even though she knows Claire will smack her if she hears these thoughts), but they sleep. She only gets through one REM cycle before Brett calls and asks that Nelson, Murdock and Lewis report for duty at the 15th Precinct, but she does manage it, and as much as she hates to admit it, Claire was right. It helps.

Hoffman’s an easy client, much easier than Healy or even Kate. She’s not sure if it’s guilt from what happened with Blake, terror of the mask, fear of Fisk, knowledge that this is the only thing that will save his ass, or just a desire to do good (she doubts that last), but he spills his guts. They’re going to be going over his story for years, she can already tell by the look on Brett’s face. He doesn’t ask them to beg for a plea bargain, doesn’t ask for a deal. He just _talks_ , and the more he talks, the more he has to say. _Cops, lawyers, judges. At least one senator that I know of._ She sits and listens, and Fisk’s world unravels.

(She keeps getting distracted by the satchel, the one Melvin had pressed on her. She left it at Claire’s, yes, but it’s lingering in the back of her head. She wants to run her fingers over the fabric of her suit again, trace the seams of blue and black. _Black protects the most,_ Melvin had said, his eyes still damp, a wobbly smile on his lips. _Red—red’ll stop a knife at the right angle. Blue’s the same as red._ And it’s electric, that blue, stitched across the seams like racing stripes down the seams along her ribs, across her shoulders and down the outsides of her arms and legs. God, she just wants to sit and _look_ at it, this suit. It makes her into someone different, someone not Darcy and not Lilith, but maybe, finally, a blending of the two that makes them really, truly whole. She’s never going to be able to thank Melvin enough, for giving her that.)

When they get back from the station, Claire’s watching TV with Santino perched on the other end of the couch, and Karen and Kate are sitting by the computer, still going over some program that Fisk’s going to have to leave to rot. She wants to curl up in a ball and not wake up for days. Darcy thumps down onto the sofa, leaning her head on Claire’s knee, and Claire just drops her hand to Darcy’s hair and scritches behind her ear without even needing to be asked. Santino looks up from his 3DS, and nudges the sole of her foot with his elbow before diving back into his game. Darcy waves at Karen a little. “What are you guys looking at?”

“Backup generator,” says Karen, without glancing away from the screen. “Marci’s finally finished her back door into L and Z, and she was right, this program is _huge_. It’s jury-rigged that you can only amend it if you have a copy of the program, and the history is only for the past week or so, but L and Z can at least view the thing, so I can snoop around. Marci was right—there are _big_ numbers being pushed through here. More than I ever saw in the Union Allied pension file. It’s—it’s all encrypted, all the accounts, but these numbers are enormous.”

“Like—thousands huge?”

“Like _millions_ huge.”

Darcy rests her hand against Claire’s leg and pushes herself up, leans forward to get a look. She’s never been all that good with spreadsheets or numbers or statistics, but the numbers—the numbers make Karen’s Union Allied pay-out look like pocket change. “Holy shit.” She swallows. “I—are there any transactions from two days ago?”

Karen gives her a sharp look, but scrolls up to the top. “Last movement,” she says, and points. “Two days ago. Why?”

“Karen, I think—I think backup generator might be Leland Owlsley’s master file.” Her pulse jumps in her throat. “How far back can you see?”

“There’s only the past week or so in here. The previous transactions were erased.” There’s a ding from Karen’s computer, and she boots over to Facebook, where a chat box from Marci Stahl is open and blinking. “Shit.”

“What?”

“Nah, Marci was trying to hack into it and she couldn’t.” She scans the message, and then kicks over to backup generator again. “She says she thinks it’s only amendable from a certain IP address. The main system—I mean, this _is_ the program, but it’s not editable from this end. It’s almost like a screenshot, taken once a day, sent through into the L and Z database in order update the people there with the information they need.”

“Like a livestream?”

“Yeah, like a livestream, but not quite so frequent.”

“Can you break the code, get into it?”

“No.” Karen pulls up another window, black, filled with lines of code. “No, it’s—it’s all encrypted. High-level stuff. Marci says it’s cobbled together from government-issue programs, CIA grade or higher. You’d only be able to access it from the inside, from—from the computer that has the original program. There’d be a password, maybe more than one, but—but you’d have a better chance of breaking through the encryption software if you use the computer it was created on. It looks like it’s IP-locked.” 

Santino perks up, and pauses his game. Darcy shakes her head. “I didn’t even know that sort of thing was even _possible._ ”

“I mean, yeah, definitely. Location-lock, system-lock. You write code to say a computer can only open one file or one program or one image if certain qualifications are met, and the computer will follow those directions.” She blows her hair out of her eyes. “It’s just—it’s beyond what I know how to deal with. Marci says she might be able to force her way into it, if she had enough time and enough space to work—some of the coding is sloppy, she says it’s like reading someone’s ode to their own awesome—but she doesn’t want to start until she knows for a fact that Fisk won’t come after her for it. Especially considering—considering the police might be all over this in a few hours.”

Her brain won’t work. She can’t pick her thoughts out from the chaos. “Hoffman’s in custody, Kare,” she says instead. “Once—once they grab Fisk, then we can look more into backup generator. But you should take a break. Or something.”

“Not until Fisk’s been arrested.” Karen looks up, finally, and the corner of her mouth flickers. “You’re falling asleep again, aren’t you?”

“No,” says Darcy, but her eyes are drooping anyway. “Maybe. I should get my stuff. We can give Claire her apartment back.”

“I don’t know. It feels like the good part of college.” Claire’s braiding a strand of Darcy’s hair without looking away from the TV screen, a quirk to her mouth. “And I had a big family when I was a kid. Noise doesn’t bother me.”

“We’re not sleeping on your floor forever, Temple.” Darcy closes her eyes for a moment. “I think you’d want to kill us in a week.”

“Well, if you were here a week, yes.” She taps Darcy’s cheek with one finger. “Lift your head, I need to top up my coffee.”

“But you’re comfortable.” Darcy lifts her head anyway, and grabs a pillow to tuck under her cheek. She pulls her feet closer to herself, and Santino slips onto the couch properly, drawing his knees up against his chest. “I think we all want to get back to our own places, you know? What do you think, Santino, you want us to stay or go?”

Santino’s ears darken, but he gives her a pleased smile, as if to say, _Thank you for saying I live here._  " _Solo no ensucien_ _,_ ” he tells her, and Darcy knocks her foot against his knee.

“ _Grosero."_

“He’s seventeen years old, he has cause to be rude.” Claire says. Santino makes a truly spectacular face. His eyes dart to Karen’s computer again, and he fiddles with the stylus of his 3DS. “ _Sé bueno con ellos, chico, o te patearán el trasero. Son buenos para eso._ ”

“ _Mientras no cause problemas él estará bien_ _,_ ” says Matt, and Karen, who’s finally noticed the barrage of Spanish, looks up. Her eyes crinkle.

“ _A_ _caso ayudarnos cuenta como causar problemas?_ ”

“Seriously, does everyone in this room speak Spanish but me?” says Foggy. Matt sits down near Darcy’s head, touching the curve of her ear accidentally-on-purpose with his thumb.

“ _Tú eres el que aprendió Punjabi_ ,” Matt says to Foggy, and Darcy snorts.

“Am I being mocked? Because I am feeling mocked.”

“If it’s IP-locked, you should be able to just rig the IP-cycler to display a dummy IP,” Santino says to Karen, and Karen blinks and goes still. “It might take a while to find one that works, but the theory’s sound. Ish. Soundish.”

“Where did you hear about this?” says Claire, in a deceptively reasonable tone Darcy remembers hearing from Jen the first time Darcy had called her drunk after a college party. Santino recognizes it too, and wilts a little. Then he lifts his chin.

“I’m good at computers. I have a few programs that might be able to work, I dunno.” He looks over his shoulder at Claire, and then slips off the sofa to crouch next to Karen. He holds one hand out, palm up, as if to say, _can I_? Karen scoots to the side. It’s more than Darcy thought Claire would ever be comfortable with, when it comes to Santino getting involved with them. Then again, here’s Santino, one of the first to ever see Matt’s real face. If anyone’s already involved, it’s Santino Vasquez. Darcy watches them until she finally can't hold her eyes open anymore, and settles into an odd half-sleep, code and Spanish filtering in and out of her reality.

She’s not sure how long she dozes. She just knows when it ends: when it’s dark, and when the quiet murmur and laughter is all shattered by Claire turning on the six o’clock news.

.

.

.

“It was too fucking good to be true,” Karen says, and she’s the only one to say it, but Darcy knows for a fact they’re all thinking it. “I knew it was too fucking good to be true. He’s Fisk. We can’t fight someone who owns everything. We can’t _win_ against a person who owns _everything_.”

 _We should have known better,_ she thinks, as she tugs her hair back out of her face, pulls the hood down over her eyes. It’s strange, makes her eyelashes flutter, makes her want to sneeze, but it’s freeing, too. _We should have known it would come to this._ There’s a funny catch at the base, one that fastens under her hair, and Karen’s the one who hooks it together. Darcy doesn’t have the right number of working hands to manage it. _We should have realized._ “Call Ben,” she says, because even if Karen’s right, they still have to try. “Call Elena, and Jen. Get them all out of sight. If Fisk really escapes, it’ll be us he comes after first, and Ben—they’re the most vulnerable.”

“What about Kate?”

“Kate’s coming with me,” Darcy says, and Karen nods. Karen goes white as a sheet, but she nods, because she sees the sense in it. Darcy has a taser, but she can’t fight. Kate can’t throw a punch, but she can shoot a beetle out of the air at fifty feet away, and she can do it without breaking a sweat. Between them, they can manage something. “I’m meeting her three blocks from here. She’s already on her way. Matt knows.”

Karen nods once. Darcy steps out of her skirt, and into the clinging pants of Melvin’s suit. It feels heavier than it looks, armor weighing her down. The inside, though, is smooth as silk. _No chafing, just like Melvin promised._ “You’re all going after Fisk?”

“No. If Fisk is making a run for it, so is Vanessa Marianna. She has Leland Owlsley’s computer, and—and if they have that, they can start over again. If you and Marci are right about the backup generator program, then they’d have all the information they’d ever need, account numbers, transaction records.” She settles the pants over the hem of the shirt, and zips them up. It makes her stomach look flatter, makes her look—it makes her look curvy, like a living snake, like someone who could actually be dangerous. “I can’t fight Fisk. I don’t know how. But we can’t let Marianna get away with that computer.”

“But you don’t even know where she’ll be.”

“Fisk was on the George Washington Bridge. He’s probably moved since then, but there are only so many ways you can get back to the Kitchen from the GWB. Matt knows what he sounds like, he’ll be able to find him—” she smooths the wrinkles out of her shirt, relishing the weight of it, and then touches her hair. There are still gold streaks in it. She’ll need to dye it, needs to hide who she is, but for now, there’s no time. It’s longer than she’d like, though. She stalks out of Claire’s bedroom. “Claire!”

“What?” Claire looks frazzled. In the kitchen, Santino nearly drops his mug. “Holy shit, what the _hell—_ ”

“Scissors,” she says, “please,” and Karen must understand, because Karen’s the one who slips past a frozen Claire and a still staring Santino to grab a pair of kitchen scissors out of the knife drawer. Matt and Foggy are muttering in low voices in another room, still figuring out Matt’s costume, she thinks.

“I can do it,” she says.

“Let me,” says Karen, and Darcy turns her back. It only takes a few sharp _snips_ , and her hair is lighter, shorter. Karen’s only cut it to the edges of her shoulder blades, long enough that she’s still—she’s still _her_ , but short enough not to be grabbed so easily. In the dark, her gold streaks look less like gold and more like veins of copper. It’s good enough.  

“Vanessa Marianna’s been in hiding for days,” Karen says, as Darcy grabs her gloves out of Melvin’s satchel. Claire’s mouth gets all thin and pinched when Darcy pulls one over her broken hand, but she doesn’t comment. “There could be a million places Fisk could go even on his own, who knows where he has her stashed?”

“The cops have been all over Fisk’s holdings for most of the day. She has to be somewhere they’re not going to look.” Darcy fluffs her shorter hair, and then heads for the boots. They have wedge heels, thick enough that she can run in them—she’d tried, last night—but high enough that they change her height. _Make you hard to recognize,_ Melvin had said. _Make you scarier_. She’s going to have to stop wearing high heels to work.

“Which leaves a lot of places, Darcy. Fisk owns half the city, it’s not as if Marianna’s not going to be somewhere easy to _find_.”

“But she has to be somewhere that has an easy escape route, one where they won’t be challenged. All the bridges and tunnels are going to be cordoned off.” She needs to get a police scanner app on her phone. She wonders if Karen can help jury rig one for her. “No airports, no train stations, no bus stations, nothing. They’re all going to be watched. Which leaves private things. Private jets, private boats, private—private fucking cars. And I doubt that Fisk is going to slink out of this city in a secret compartment in some pedo’s windowless minivan.” Especially not with his true love in tow.

She can _see_ it when Karen’s eyes light up. “Fisk didn’t have so many shares in transport as Owlsley did,” she says, and she goes back to the computer. Santino scoots out of the way like she’s set a poker to his ass. “There are only a few places they could go where they won’t be automatically shut down. Foggy, give her your phone.”

“Why is it always my phone?” Foggy says, coming out of the hallway, but he pulls his phone out of his pocket and hands it to Darcy anyway. There’s a pocket stitched right where her hand would fall, against her thigh. She slips it in there, and Velcros the flap down.

“Marci’s up,” says Karen, glancing over her shoulder. “We’ll cross-check everything, tell you where to go. We’re not going to have a lot of time, but if we use one of Marci’s programs, look over all of the—” She stops. Her eyes widen. “Holy _shit._ ”

“What?” says Darcy, but then she looks around, and there’s the devil.

She’s not sure what to say. _Is this what I look like_? Utterly foreign, utterly recognizable. Matt’s costume has horns, and at any other moment she’d make fun of him for them— _imagine, a Catholic with devil horns; you’re really Mephistopheles now, you dink_ —but right now? Right now, he looks _dangerous._ Dark, dark red, veins of black. Like magma, slowly freezing. Like coals in dust. Like drying blood. He can’t see her, not the way she’s seeing him right now, but she wonders if he’s thinking the same thing. “Hey,” she says, finally. “You look—you look like you.”

Matt actually smiles. “And I'm pretty sure you look like you,” he replies, and yeah. She feels like her. She feels like Lilith and Darcy and Darcy Lewis, Attorney at Law. All three of them at once. It’s fucking _amazing._

“Well, you—you don’t like Natasha Romanoff anymore, that’s for sure,” says Foggy, and she presses her hand over the cell phone in her pocket. Then she grabs her taser, slotting it into the holster.

“Marianna won’t be alone,” says Claire. “He’ll have left men to protect her.” And Claire—she and Claire, and Karen, too, they have one up on the rest of them, the only ones who’ve had the shit kicked out of them by Fisk’s men without being able to fight back. By the assassin, by the Goodmans, by the Russians. Claire closes her hands tight into fists, and Darcy thinks it’s to hide the way they’re trembling. “You’ll have to take them out to get to her.”

“Yeah, I know.” Darcy touches the taser on her hip, and thinks about Barrett’s gun. But no—the gun she’d bought, after the Goodmans attacked her, this one she has now in the bottom of her purse—the guns have never felt _right_ to her the way the taser does. The guns feel dangerous. The taser feels like her. “But there’ll be fewer men on Vanessa Marianna than there will be on Wilson Fisk. _Don’t_ start,” she snaps at Matt, but Matt shakes his head once, his eyes hidden by the mask.

“You’re right.” He presses his mouth tightly closed, and she can _see_ the way it frightens him, the thought of her going off without him when the night’s turned into this, when she still has no idea how to fight like he does, can’t even begin to imagine it. (She can imagine what it would feel like, though, to lash out, to watch them bleed. She still wants Fisk dead. She’d be willing to settle for Vanessa, if she has to. But she won’t, because as much as she hates and hates and _hates_ , she’s not Fisk. She’s not Vanessa Marianna. She doesn’t take lives. That’s not her purpose.) Besides: they have no time, and she’s defended herself before. She can do it again. “If they get away with Owlsley’s computer, then everything—Darcy’s right. They’d have access to everything they needed. All the accounts that have been locked, all of it. They’d be able to rebuild. It can’t happen.”

“Thank you,” says Darcy. “Besides, I’m not the one going after Fisk alone.” And her heart is racing at the thought of it, because the last time Matt and Fisk were in the same room, Matt had—well, it hadn’t been good. She knows for a fact that he can hear it, the way air suddenly snags in her lungs, but he doesn’t even twitch. “Kate’s going with me.”

Claire opens her mouth, and then closes it again. She reaches out and presses her hand flat against Darcy’s back, in the small of her spine. Karen’s plugged her earbuds into her ears, or one of them, anyway, leaving the other to dangle. Darcy thinks she can hear the _Mad Max: Fury Road_ soundtrack blasting out of the sound card. “You’re ready for this?” Claire asks, and Darcy smiles. Her lipstick is still tacky on her mouth, too fresh.

“Please, Temple, I’m always ready for anything. Thought you knew that.”

Claire’s fingers twitch against her back. Then she curls one arm around Darcy’s shoulder, pulling her into a hug. She’s not sure what Claire’s trying to say, in the doing of it. Maybe _be safe_ and _please come back_ and _don’t do anything too ridiculous._ Maybe _I wish I understood you._ Maybe _you’re more like him than you know_. Maybe all of them at once. Darcy heaves a breath, and wraps her arms tight around Claire, ignoring the little pinch in her ribs—which has faded enough that she barely notices, anymore—and the way her heart’s pounding in her chest. Claire lets her go.

“Go,” she says. “Don’t fuck up.”

“Such a vote of confidence,” says Darcy, but she pats Claire’s shoulder anyway. And Santino’s cheek, because he’s right there, and he looks stressed enough that he needs a pat or two. He flinches a little, looking at her with big eyes. “Don’t let any strangers in. I know how you love to do that.”

“I took the Stranger Danger courses same as you, asshole.”

“And yet you still pulled Matt out of his dumpster.”

Claire ignores her. “Seriously. There’s no time for this. You have to _go_.”

She knows. Darcy presses her cheek to Claire’s—it feels strange, through her mask—and then turns to Karen and Foggy. Karen’s still half-plugged into her computer, but she’s turned on her barstool, and when Darcy opens her arms, they both come into her. Vanilla and coffee and whiteboard marker and shampoo, Foggy Nelson and Karen Page, and she lets them hold onto her for a moment. She thinks they’d do this for Matt, too, if he’d let them. But there’s no time to try and pull him into it. She kisses Foggy’s cheek hard, and Karen’s, and it leaves bloody prints behind on their skin.

“Tell me what you find,” she says to Karen. Karen catches her hand, and presses a flash drive into Darcy’s palm. It’s the one Marci gave her, the 250 gig. Darcy curls her fingers over it, blinking.

“Get everything off the computer you can. Me and Marci and Santino, we can look at it when you get back.” Karen’s voice breaks. She presses her mouth to Darcy’s temple, over the mask. “Be safe.”

“Yeah.” She looks at Foggy, gives him a shaky smile. “Thanks for the phone.”

“You’re giving that back. It has all my music on it.”

She flaps her hand— _yeah, yeah—_ and goes to join Matt at the window. Then she hears Foggy shift behind them, and she turns back around. Foggy clasps her hand, grips Matt’s elbow hard. He looks at them, as hard as she’s ever seen him look at anyone, and he says, “Go be heroes. And _don’t you fucking die_.”

Her throat squeezes. She looks up at Matt—his lips have gone thin, but in a _I will not react to that_ way as opposed to a _I am very angry_ way—and then looks back at Foggy, lifting her hand, touching his shoulder. “Think _Terminator,_ Foggy.”

“As in Sarah Connor? Arnold Schwarzenegger?

“We’ll be back,” Darcy says, and she heaves herself out the window before Foggy can react. It won’t be the last time she sees him. She refuses to think of that. She refuses to think of any of that. She’ll be back, because she told him they’d come back, and they _will_. There’s no question of that. Not right now.

Kate’s overeager. She’s waiting for them on a fire escape two blocks away from Claire’s apartment, and she’s—she looks different. Darcy recognizes the leotard pants, the ones that Kate had taken with her from her private archery range when she pulled her vanishing act, but the shirt—dark purple, long-sleeved on one side, sleeveless on the other with the seam still threaded and ripped—that’s new. There’s a thin pair of sunglasses on her face, wicked-sharp. Darcy doesn’t dare ask how she can see. Kate looks at Matt, and then at Darcy, and doesn’t comment. “Ben’s back in hiding, Yoko’s somewhere safe, and Brigid’s keeping me updated on the news from the scanners. Where are we going?”

“You’re staying with her.” Matt keeps his voice low and his hands to himself. At this angle, shadows and horns and sharp edges in the moonlight, he doesn’t look like Matt. He doesn’t look like the devil, either, not anymore. He looks like how she feels. Like something bigger. Like something _more._ A symbol, maybe. Of what, though, she has no idea. “Vanessa Marianna’s on the move, same as Fisk. They both need to be stopped.”

Kate looks at Darcy, and when Darcy nods, she says, “Okay. What about you?”

“He’s going after Fisk.”

The tendons in Kate’s jaw go tight, quivering like piano wire. “Alone?”

Her mouth’s tacky, but Darcy nods. Kate stares for a time, but eventually she just inclines her head, not to Matt but to Darcy— _if you think it’s best_ —and she has no idea what to make of that _._ (Because she doesn’t think it’s best, she wants to go with him, she wants to help, but they don’t have time, and they can’t afford to let Vanessa escape with that laptop, not when so much of what’s inside it could be used for evil, but she doesn’t want to let him out of her sight—) Kate dips her hand into the pocket on the outside of her utility quiver (Darcy’s not sure where she found a thing like that, but it’s damn useful), and closes her fist around something. When she catches Matt by the wrist, he doesn’t protest. “Wear this,” she says. It’s one of the little waxy bulb communicators, the ones that they’d used in Our Lady of Mercy. This one looks a little larger, but then again, Matt will have it hidden under his mask. “It’s long-distance. We’ll be able to hear you, but you won’t be able to hear us. Channel’s secure.”

Matt takes the comm, and tugs his mask up just far enough on one side that he can press it into place. She wonders if he’ll turn the volume down as low as he can, if he’s already done it. “If I hear anything about Marianna—”

“We’ll know.” Kate peers over the top of her sunglasses, her eyes flicking from Darcy to Matt, and she shifts her quiver back over her shoulder. “I’ll be waiting over there,” she says, “when you’re ready,” and then she drops off the edge of the building onto the fire escape one floor down. Apparently both Kate Bishop and Matt Murdock are insane adrenalin junkies, and she will have to train this out of them if it’s the last thing she does. She turns, because this is information that must be shared, and then stops. She looks at Matt, and the words dry up. Because what is she supposed to say that hasn’t already been said?

“I don’t know if I like this new outfit,” she says, finally. “It’s—I liked the black.”

His lips curl, but only for a second. Matt sets his gloved hand to the back of her neck, and it feels strange, a touch that’s muffled through thick cloth and armor. “Hopefully I’ll figure out how to move in it before I get to Fisk. It’s heavier.” And yes, of course it’s heavier, but it sends a bolt of fear through her that anything could make him vulnerable, that something could happen because they haven’t had enough time. It feels like they’ve had all the time in the world, but they still don’t have enough. She lifts her fingers to his jaw, and just rests them there, not entirely sure what else to do. It’s all she can manage. There’s no kiss, no eternal vow. He knows who he is to her, she thinks. And she knows who she is to him. She doesn’t have to repeat it. Besides: she’s always hated saying goodbyes.

“I’ll be listening,” she says, and taps her ear to make the point, even if the bulb isn’t in yet. “Be careful.”

Matt touches her cheek, and then drops his hand again. “You, too,” he says, and then he turns. He does a full frontal flip onto the next building, and vanishes into the dark before she can lose her nerve. Darcy takes a deep breath. Then she takes another. She’s halfway through the third when she follows Kate off the roof, down into the shadows.

It’s only ten minutes later when Karen texts them about the helicopter pad on the roof of the Confederated Global building. She needs to start running, she thinks, as she leads the way through the shadows and the alleys, past drunks and the homeless and women of the streets. People stop and blink at them, watch with wide eyes in this city where nobody’s ever flapped by anything, and she’d let it get to her if she had time to stop and think about it. But she doesn’t, so there’s only the motion, the pinch in her side, the squeeze of her rib and the ache in her throat as she takes another gasping breath. She needs to get herself stronger, get her stamina up. Her heart is pounding, and it’s not only because of the excitement, because of the terror. Matt was right—the suit is heavier than she’d realized, first putting it on, has a weight and a heft like it has its own body, and she needs to learn how to move with it rather than against it. She doesn’t slow down, though, and she doesn’t stop. Kate keeps up, her arrows slung close across on her back and her bow held tight in her left hand. Her right arm, her bare arm, gleams pale in the dark. Her hair streams out behind her like a flag, and even though she knows that Matt’s alone ( _alone when he shouldn’t have to be, alone when I told him he’d never be that, not ever again_ ) she’s glad to have Kate with her, joyous. They’re a good team, Lilith and Hawkingbird. They’re not as smooth as Lilith and the devil, not so practiced, not so close, but they fit nonetheless. They lunge and scrape and find a singular kind of satisfaction in the depths of violence that they’re not supposed to want. If the devil and Lilith are striving for justice, then Lilith and Kate—maybe they can be vengeance.

Confederated Global is empty, the crime scene tape still pasted up over the main entrance. It’s like Goodman Tower, like Stark Tower, like every monument to power and strength and modern, unfettered, fantastically inaccurate masculinity that she’s ever seen in this city, glass and silvery chrome. They take the back door in, sneak through the parking garage and into the elevators in the back, and she takes great pleasure in using her (gloved, protected) fist to smash through the glass in the empty security office. There are no feeds up on any of the screens, but Darcy drops down into the rolling chair (there’s a dip to it that says there was a much heavier butt than hers using this chair not too long ago, and she thinks of _Paul Blart, Mall Cop_ , for an insane second) and hits the power button, flicking through the feeds. She can hear breathing on Matt’s end, noises of the city, but nothing else.

“What are you looking for?” Kate puts her shoulders back, crossing her arms over her chest. She’s supposed to be wearing a mask, Darcy thinks, looking at her. But she’d look odd with one, Kate would. There’s something powerful in how shamelessly she flaunts her own identity, something indescribably, intoxicatingly reckless in how she says _come at me, motherfuckers_ , like there’s nothing that can hurt her. “The helipad’s on the roof.”

“And there are men on these floors,” Darcy says, as she flicks through the eighty-eighth, eighty-ninth, and ninetieth floors. It’s the ninetieth that they have to get to, but it’s the men on the eighty-eighth and eighty-ninth that could be a problem. She flicks to the roof feed, and there’s a tall, slender woman waiting on the helipad, wrapped in fur and staring out into the night as if it has all the answers. There’s only one man waiting at her side, and he’s halfway out of the helicopter. He’s probably the pilot. Darcy texts Karen— _found her_ —and then turns off the phone, sliding it deep into the side pocket again. “Better to take them out first.”

“Three teams of two,” says Kate. She bares her teeth a little. “Not too hard. You want to split them?”

Honestly, Darcy’s not sure she can take three guys all on her own, but there’s no time to argue about it. “Half and half. One for each of us on each floor. _Don’t_ let them scream.”

“Not my intention.”

“And don’t kill them,” she says, because it has to be said. Retribution, vengeance—that’s not the same as murder. Kate tosses her hair back over her shoulder, rolling her eyes.

“Please. I’m not _completely_ insane, only mostly.” She pops Darcy with her fist on the back of her shoulder. “Come on, Lilith. Let’s get your ass to work.”

They take the elevator to the eighty-seventh floor, because the elevators in this building have that sneaky set-up where lights turn on behind floor numbers to let people know there’s a car coming. Darcy leads the way on the emergency stairs, and her palms are dry as bone inside her gloves as she draws the taser from its holster, buzzing it twice to make sure it’s on full power. She’s been careful to keep it charged, to keep the cartridges loaded (and there’s a second pocket on her left side, where more cartridges can be stowed; she can’t thank Melvin enough for this suit); it works. Kate draws an arrow, smooth and silent as a spirit. In the bulb in her ear, she hears Matt breathing.

“I don’t know if either of you can hear this,” he says, “but I’m tracking Fisk’s car. He’s on the move.”

Darcy closes her eyes. _On one,_ she mouths to Kate, and Kate nods once. On the other side of the door, she can hear footsteps. On the camera, these men had moved in a set formation, passing each other in the middle of the hallway, but otherwise not coming close. Darcy flashes three fingers at Kate. Two.

“Be safe,” Matt says, and in the same moment, she slams the door open, and fires.

It’s only on the third floor, the ninetieth floor, that they have trouble. The man she tases turns at the last moment, catches only half the blast. He manages to slam his fist across her cheek before Darcy rams into him and hits the button on the stunner, giving him a full hit right in the solar plexus. Her cheek is throbbing, but her nose isn’t bloody, which is a miracle. She’s not in the New York DNA archives, and honestly, she’d prefer to stay that way. Kate fires again, and the man on the other end of the hall is pinned to the plaster by his arms, held akimbo like a scarecrow. He’s not even injured, just stuck to the wall, unable to reach—well, anything, really. When Lilith hits him with her taser, he’s out like a light. She prods at her cheek, swearing to herself. “Son of a _bitch_.”

Kate draws another arrow from her quiver. “You okay?”

“Fine.” And she is. The curling in her throat, the thunder in her gut, that’s anger, not fear. _Bastard shouldn’t have fucking hit me._ “Time for the roof.”

It’s started to snow. It’s early in the year for it, almost too early, but the snapping chill and the height and the wind have turned this place into a prime habitat for snowflakes. Darcy pushes the roof door open as quietly as she can, wincing at every squeak, and in her ear, Matt lets out a long breath. “Found him,” he says, and she imagines she can hear the buzz of a car, the hum of an engine. There’s only the wind, and Matt’s breathing. Then a shriek, and a shattering, metal and rubber on asphalt. She refuses to flinch. Kate looks over at her, and her eyes are wide behind her glasses. Darcy shakes her head, points to the air conditioning unit a few feet away, pushing at the air with her palm. _Stay down._ Kate gets a stubborn tilt to her mouth, but she jerks her head in a way that Darcy thinks means _yes_. It’s only once Kate’s out of sight, an arrow nocked to the string, that Darcy peers towards the helipad.

The helicopter is cast in a glowing circle of yellow light, blinding the woman and her companion to anything out in the shadows. And there is only the two of them, just like the feeds had shown, one man with a gun under his open jacket and Vanessa Marianna, her purse over one shoulder, a bag held close against her side. _Elsa,_ Darcy thinks, _the Ice Queen,_ and she gestures at Kate again, making a finger gun with her good hand. Kate nods once, and tips her head back against the air conditioner. Darcy wonders if she’s praying, or breathing.  

 _One man,_ she thinks. _And Vanessa Marianna._

“You were right,” Matt says in her ear. “What you told me over the radio that night.”

She loads a cartridge into her taser, knocks it home. Darcy flashes two fingers at Kate. Then one.

“Not everyone deserves a happy ending.”

.

.

.

She hears the twang of the bowstring a single heartbeat before Christian screams, and it takes her so by surprise that Vanessa cannot breathe.

The arrow’s gone right through the shoulder at an angle, and pins him into the side of the helicopter at a depth and a viciousness that shouldn’t be possible from a stick of grapheme and metal. It’s pierced hard and deep, right through the thin cloth covering the spot beneath his collarbone— _no armor there, the only place to hit really, and Christian should stop leaving his jacket unbuttoned, it leaves him too open_ —and if she looks, if she stares, she can see the blood seeping through. Soon it will speckle the snow, casting crimson shadows over the faint dusting of white over the concrete. _You’re not snow,_ Wilson had said. _You’re white fire._ Christian howls, and he reaches for something (his gun, the arrow, the pain, the blood), but then another arrow flies. He’s caught right through the hand, and there’s a spattering as more blood hits concrete, as it steams in the frosty air. It’s so sudden and strange, the sight of the arrows and the sharpness of the blood, that she can’t make herself understand. _An arrow? A bowman?_ But Hawkeye has been out of the country, has shown no interest in any of this, has no reason to—

Then she sees the darkness move, sees the woman step out of the shadows, and it clicks. _Lilith,_ she thinks. _The Goodmans. The devil, and the archer._

The woman stands almost even with her, five feet, six or seven inches, though the heels may have something to do with it. Her hair—her hair is dark, not red, but it could be a wig, could be a disguise. ( _In the hospital, Zaccardi and his partner said she’d been blonde, and there’s no way to know, really, no way to tell if she keeps shifting, changing, transforming into something new—_ ) She’s dressed all in black, the seams threaded through with blue, and there’s a hood pulled down over her face. All that’s left to see is her round mouth. It’s painted the sort of red that makes Vanessa think of arterial spray, and it’s twisted as if she smells something nasty.

“You’re gonna want to put the bag down,” she says, and she raises the bulky stun-gun as if it’s a threat. It is, more than she knows. Vanessa has no idea what her body will do to her, if she’s hit with electricity that powerful. Still, there’s a strange sort of weightlessness to her as she stares at the taser, watching it blankly. To be entirely honest, she’s still stuck on the idea of arrows. “Slowly, Miss Marianna, or you’re not going to like what happens.”

“You shot my man,” Vanessa says, because it’s the only thing she can say. There’s sweat beading up on Christian’s dark skin, and blood drips on his shoes. “That was unfriendly.”

“Technically, I didn’t,” says Lilith. There’s another burst of shadow, and then a tall, whip-thin woman with dark hair and a sharp face steps away from the wall, another arrow nocked to the string. It’s aimed not at Christian, but at Vanessa’s face. Moonlight glints off the arrowhead. “She did.”

“Cheers,” says the bowman, and Vanessa’s fingers itch for paint for the first time in years. She doesn’t have any real skill with the brush—it’s why she sells other people’s work, doesn’t make her own—but there’s something intriguing in the sheer angularity of this one, all harsh lines and obsidian where Lilith is curves and smoke. “I’m sure he deserves worse.”

“And now we’re all friendly,” says Lilith. “I’d say we could even go out for drinks, if we wanted. Still, there’s the whole _I’m dating a criminal mastermind_ hold-up on your end, V. Not something we can really overlook, on our end. Though I’m sure you have one hell of a liquor cabinet.”

Vanessa has no idea what to say to this, either. If Lilith’s joking, it’s not very funny. “How did you find me?”

“Google is a god,” says Lilith. She sounds like a tourist, like a southern hick taking a train up for a week in the city. “When you look up _how to escape from a city that hates your guts,_ the first thing it tells you is _get a private helipad._ ”

Christian spits a word that Vanessa will strike him for at a later date. For now, she ignores it. Lilith purses her lips.

“So friendly.”

Vanessa presses her purse close against her side with her elbow, ignoring the little Catherine wheels of pain arcing through her muscles. “What do you want?”

“I already told you.” Lilith dips the taser, and lifts it again. “The bag. Put it down. And I wouldn’t do that if I were you, dude. Your hand won’t appreciate it.”

Vanessa darts a glance at Christian, just as he drops his free hand (and what it must be doing to his shoulder, she can’t even imagine) away from his desperate grope for the second bolt. He’s pinned, and it hits her all over again, the sheer efficacy with which he’d been taken out of the picture. And not even by the devil, but by the women who had clung to the shadows. _Maybe they’re both Lilith,_ she thinks. _Maybe they switch off._ It doesn’t help her put names to masks, but it’s a theory. Her .22 is in her purse, pressed against her ribs, and if she can get her fingers on it she can change the tide, but for now, she’s alone. Vanessa holds up both hands. She lets the bag slide slowly down her arm, resting on the ground. It’s half-open, and snow dapples the back of Leland’s laptop. Why they want the bag and not her is a mystery, but it hurts to watch it go. Christian is pinned twice over, and the smell of blood eats away at the inside of her nose.

The Lilith woman cocks her head, as if she’s heard something, and then shakes it away.

“Your gun, too,” she says, and Vanessa’s lips thin. “Keep your hands out of that purse, lady. Bag on the ground, right next to the other one. Slowly,” she adds, her voice sharp, and Vanessa obeys, because a bullet and an arrow do the same thing when it comes to bone and brains. It’s only once her purse and her .22 are as far out of reach as she can get without taking a step that Lilith nods once.

“See? Friendly.”

“You have a weird definition of that,” says the archer, but otherwise doesn’t comment.

“Your bags,” says Lilith, the South rounding out her words. “Kick the little one over first. I know you can do it, even in those shoes. And keep your hands in the air while you do it, please.”

Vanessa obeys. Her gun slides out when the purse stops, but Lilith—Lilith just uses her heel to swipe the .22 over to her partner, who puts a booted foot on it as if she’s claiming territory. “Now the other,” Lilith says. “Gently, please. If you break the computer I’m going to be very unhappy.”

“Miss Vanessa,” says Christian, but Vanessa does as she’s asked. She hooks her foot underneath the bag and she shoves as hard as she can without hurting herself. One or two of the papers edge out into the snow, but Lilith—Lilith just bends and collects them, heaving the bag up over her shoulder and sliding it out of the way. It feels as if she’s just carved a piece of herself out and handed it over still steaming, dripping red. She might not have failed Iris’s first test, but this is something entirely. She’s failed something more than Iris. She’s failed Wilson. She’s failed herself.

_Wilson is coming, and he’ll rip her apart._

“Why are you here?” she asks, and her voice is remarkably steady, considering how much she wants to scream. “You surely don’t think you can stop me from leaving. I’ve done nothing illegal. I thought your type only bullies the villains of the piece.”

“Nothing illegal, she says,” says Lilith, and there’s a thin vein of hatred and mockery and triumph in her voice that makes Vanessa’s stomach roll. “Conspiracy to murder. Aiding and abetting a wanted fugitive. Aiding and abetting in racketeering, human trafficking, smuggling, acts of terrorism. Murder, too. Unless you want me to believe it _wasn’t_ you who pulled the trigger on Francis Lawton?”

The way Christian freezes does more to damn her than a surveillance video ever could. Her blood chills. Her nerves sting. Vanessa works her throat, tries to swallow. “You have no proof of that,” she tells Lilith, and Lilith’s pretty mouth curves upwards into a vicious sort of smile. “No proof of any of it. And I see no police to do your job for you.”

“I don’t need evidence when I have proof, darlin’,” Lilith says. “I’m not the cops and I’m not a jury. I know who you are and what you’ve done. Fisk may think you’re some painted angel, waiting for him when he’s done all his dirty work, but you’re not, are you? You’re just as nasty as he is. You make a good pair, the both of you.”

“There’s an old story about a pot and a kettle that I think you’ll like.”

Lilith actually laughs. “He called the devil his own twisted reflection, once, your boyfriend. Wilson Fisk and the devil of Hell’s Kitchen, illusions in a fun-house mirror.” She eyes Vanessa for a moment. “I wonder if we’re not the same way, you and me. The difference is I don’t keep looking for him to save me, because I know when I’m outplayed.”

Vanessa presses her lips tight together. “Tell me,” she says, still watching Lilith’s face. “How does it feel to know that you’ve destroyed the only hope this city has for redemption?”

Lilith doesn’t even twitch. “He’s brainwashed you too, huh.” She drops a hand into Vanessa’s bag without looking, feeling out the laptop. “Shame. I always like to see a lady who knows her own mind.”

“How strange,” says Vanessa, refusing to acknowledge the hollow, echoing scream that’s starting somewhere near her feet. Christian makes a soft sound, and the archer draws her arrow back to her cheek again, ready to let fly. “I feel precisely the same way.”

They stare at each other. Then Lilith gestures with her taser. “You’re going to step away from the helicopter, Miss Marianna,” she says. “Your boyfriend’s getting his ass handed to him—” Vanessa’s mouth twists, because she can’t possibly know that, Wilson is _coming_ , he has to be coming, because he needs to be here, with her, they need to _leave_ and there’s only a few minutes left— “—and it looks like your little vacation is canceled.”

Vanessa doesn’t move. “You know, Wilson—he told me once that there are different kinds of shadows. You can’t have light without the dark to highlight it, but when it comes to darkness—it can smother, or it can harmonize. It’s like in art, _chiaroscuro._ The deeper the darkness, the stronger the light becomes. It’s a nice metaphor, but it depends on the darkness not overpowering all it’s placed beside.”

“Let me guess.” Lilith’s mouth thins. “I’m the overwhelming darkness. The devil and me.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Vanessa sees a flickering shadow. Neither Lilith nor her pet archer girl seem to notice it. Nor does Christian, she realizes. He’s fixated on Lilith, on what little they can make out of her face, blood sliding down into his sleeves, staining. She draws her shoulders back, hooks a hand into the strap beside the door of the helicopter.

“This city is yours,” she says. “For now. Let it drown in the darkness you’ll throw it into. It only means that when we return, the light will be so much more dazzling than you could ever imagine.”

“Vanessa,” says Lilith, sharper this time. “Get out of the helicopter, or I’ll make you.”

“I’d rather not,” she says, “if it’s all the same to you.”

Lilith scowls. She opens her mouth. Then her eyes widen, and she darts to the side just as a blade flies through the place right where her head was a moment before. The archer lets out a snarl—“ _Lilith_!”—and looses her arrow, but a second knife flashes in the spotlight, and the bolt is knocked off course. Vanessa turns and seizes the shafts holding Christian to the side of the ‘copter, pulling one free, and then the second. Blood streaks her palms, down her fur coat. Her hands are burning. “Come on,” she says, and seizes him by the tie, shoving him towards the helicopter. “Come on, come on—”

It’s a cacophony of arrows and electricity, and when Christian slams into the pilot’s seat, hooking the headset over his ears, Vanessa takes the passenger side. There’s a dark figure backing towards the helicopter, too tall and too thin to be the man she wants, but he’s made himself her ally, so she doesn’t let herself think about it right now. Vanessa snaps the mufflers over her ears, and starts flipping switches. She’d started flying helicopters when she was a child, when her father had been around to show her, and though it’s been a long time, her muscle memory is still quite perfect. “ _Hurry_ ,” she shouts, and the man in shadow heaves himself up into the helicopter at the same moment the archer lets fly. There’s a crackle when the arrowhead embeds itself into the glass beside Vanessa’s cheek, and she looks at it for a long time as Christian heaves the helicopter into the air, streaking blood over the controls, color fleeing his face.

They arc over the city, over its lights and sounds and silences, and Vanessa wants to scream. Computer, gone. Wilson, left behind. Her gun, her work, in Lilith’s hands. _I’ve failed. I’ve abandoned him. I’ve lost everything, and it’s all my fault._  She waits until they’ve passed into New Jersey airspace, until they’re gone— _we’re leaving him, we’ve abandoned him, we have to go back, we have to_ —before she turns in her seat. The man in her helicopter is very tall and very thin, his hands big and wide as spider-webs. His nose looks as if it was broken more than once. She can’t quite decide if he’s Asian, or white, or somewhere in between. Not that it particularly matters. He watches her with slate gray eyes, unblinking, almost the way a snake would. She likes the look of him, this man, and understanding him, learning him, will give her something to think about other than the wormhole left inside her.

“Thank you,” she shouts over the whir of the blades. “We owe you our lives.”

“I was sent to assist you in any way I could,” says the man. He speaks loudly, but somehow it’s as if he’s whispering. It’s difficult for her to process. “It was my pleasure, Miss Marianna.”

Her heart leaps up into her throat. “Gao sent you?”

“Madame Gao requested that I come to your aid, yes.” He eyes her. It’s not the sort of look that men usually give her, weighing her positives and negatives, trying to determine what she can do for them. It’s almost like he’s looking for weaknesses in her. She’s not sure if he finds any, or if she has any strengths left to her at all. He does not offer her his hand. “For as long as is necessary.”

Vanessa hooks her hair behind her ears, tightens her scarf down. “What do I call you?” she shouts, and the man’s thin lips turn up into an odd, Gao-like little smile.

“Davos,” he says. “You may call me Davos. Where are we going, Miss Vanessa?”

“Boston,” says Vanessa, and Christian angles for Massachusetts. “There’s work we have to do.”

.

.

.

The helicopter’s gone before they can blink, and she’s not sure what echoes louder, the sound of whirring blades, or the sudden rush of silence. 

“God _fucking_ damn it!” Kate kicks the AC, sits down hard. The bag with the computer is untouched, dappled on the side with snow, but Marianna—Marianna’s gone. There had been something wrong with her, Darcy thinks. The hollows in her face had been filled with shadows and monsters. “Fucking—god _fucking_ dammit. We have to go after her!”

“No, we don’t.” Darcy bends, picks up the bag. The laptop feels fine, undamaged. She grabs Vanessa’s purse, too, the one with the gun in it, and just looks at the .22 for a moment before hooking the strap of it around her wrist. There’s a soft, pained sound through the commlink, and Darcy flinches once before steeling herself. “The computer’s here, and that’s what we came here for.”

“I _fucking_ know that, goddammit. She just managed to _get the fuck away_.” She yanks an arrow out of the AC. “Fucking fucking fuck.”

“We’ll catch her.” She roots out one of the throwing knives. It’s marked with a curving snake, the same as the symbol on the Triad woman’s drugs. Darcy wraps the blade in Vanessa Marianna’s scarf, and shoves it into the bag with the laptop. “She’ll come back eventually, and we’ll catch her. Until then—”

Someone _howls_. She thinks they’ve missed one of the guards until she sees Kate’s fingers fly to her ear, and realizes it’s coming through the commlink. Darcy squeezes her eyes shut, listening hard, covering her free ear so that there’s no interference. Her heart is rushing, racing. On the other end of the line, Fisk bellows, something almost inhuman, and for a second she can feel his fingers around her throat again, feel the weight of him, pressing down, down, down. She can’t make out what he’s saying, only picks up a few words. _Drown. Filth. Father._ She thinks of the weight of him, the height, the power, a headless Russian on a cold night. _Matt._ She can barely make out who’s who through the cacophony of sounds, the echo of the violence. _Matt,_ she thinks. _Matt._ She can only understand a few words. “— _my city_ ,” the devil says, “ _my family_ ,” and yes, that’s right, that’s real and true, and she presses a fist to her mouth and swallows hard. There’s one final crunch, and then silence.

“Matt,” she mouths, and closes her eyes.

“ _Police_!” The shout’s so sudden, and so close, that Kate actually lets out a little scream at the shock of it. But there’s no one on the roof but them, her and Kate and the blood in the snow. The knives of the man who defended Vanessa Marianna. “Show me your hands! Do it!”

“Sergeant,” the devil says. “I’m not the bad guy.”

“Oh my fucking god,” says Kate, but in an entirely different voice this time. It makes it impossible to hear what Matt says next, what Brett says, though numbers stick out. _Four, six, and ten._ 46th and 10th. Only four blocks away. Kate turns, and there’s slow dawn coming over her face, her eyes widening, her lips parting. “Oh my _fucking_ god. I think he did it.”

“I think he did it,” Darcy repeats. She closes her eyes. _He did it._ “Fisk is done. Fisk is _done._ ”

Kate crashes into her with the force of a train, and Darcy holds on. She’s not sure if she wants to laugh, to cry. To scream. To sing. To take a running leap and see if she can fly. “It’s done,” Kate says into her hood, “it’s done, it’s done, it’s _done—_ ” and Darcy grabs her by the wrist and tugs her into the camera-less stairwell before she does something silly like lose her glasses and out herself as Kate Bishop to the world. She plugs the flash drive into Owlsley’s computer with shaking hands. Total memory usage on this device: _239 gigabytes._ _Oh, god fucking bless._

“We’ll celebrate when we’re back behind closed doors,” Darcy says, but her voice cracks with the effort of keeping it steady. “Just—just gimme two minutes.”

“Can’t we just take the computer?”

“No, the police need it. And I don’t—”

“Hey.” Brett’s voice is jarring, makes her palms sweat. “So, is it true? What the Lynch kid said. There are really two of you running around?”

She hears Matt’s breath, feels it in her chest like it’s her own. Darcy presses two fingers to her ear, wishing she was there. “Yeah,” the devil says. “She has a present for you, by the way.”

“What would that be, a nuclear warhead? Because I’m not beyond believing that nuclear warheads are a thing that Wilson Fisk can pull out of his ass.”

“Leland Owlsley’s master computer.” There’s a clang of metal on the other end. “All the evidence you’ll need to put Silver and Brent behind bars.”

“Leland Owlsley is dead.”

“His work isn’t. It’s worth looking into, Sergeant.”

There’s a soft exhale from the other end. “I’ll take your word for it. So—what am I supposed to call you when I file my report? Both of you.”

Darcy’s lips part.

“She already named herself.” There’s a shift, a crackle of static. “But some people call me Daredevil.”

“Daredevil,” Brett repeats. “Daredevil and Lilith.” She can almost see the way Brett’s sighing, the way his eyes roll. “God, my CO’s gonna _love_ this.”

She stops listening, after that. Darcy looks at the computer— _34% complete already, fast little thing—_ and pulls Foggy’s phone from her pocket, turns it back on with a shaking hand. She hits four on speed-dial, because Foggy’s had Karen on speed-dial since she became their secretary, and she waits. It only rings once before they pick up, and silence echoes down the line.

“Hello?” It’s Foggy. “Darcy?”

She takes a breath. Holds it in. The cold air burns at her lungs. Leland Owlsley’s computer is resting on her lap.

“Darcy, if you are prank calling me or ass-dialing me or whatever the hell you’re doing, I swear to god I’m going to fucking _kill you._ Because you are terrible and you suck. And if you’re dead or something—”

“No, I’m not dead,” she says, and the smile spreads so slowly it could be a memory. “Hey, Foggy.”

“You’re okay?” Foggy bursts out in a rush. “You’re both okay? Where are you? We haven’t heard anything, there’s nothing on the news—”

“We did it,” says Darcy, and closes her eyes. Kate comes up beside her, and rests a hand on her shoulder. “We did it. We’re on our way back.”

The other end erupts into sound. Darcy hangs up. She looks up at the ceiling, the phone clenched tightly in her good hand, and she breathes.

“Well,” Kate says. She shoves an arrow back into the quiver. “We’d better go before the police get here.”

“Nah,” Darcy says. “I want to do something special.”

.

.

.

Brett’s face when he finds the laptop on the reception desk of Confederated Global, marked with a post-it (in Kate’s handwriting, because Brett knows hers)— _To Sgt. Brett Mahoney, xoxo L_ —is worth the wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation!
> 
> Habibti is "my darling" or "my dear" in Arabic; it's used between lovers and family members, but also between friends. Just kind of a casual endearment. 
> 
> Mio gioiello is "my jewel." 
> 
> Santino: Just don't be gross.  
> Darcy: Rude.  
> Claire: Be nice to them, kid, or they'll kick the crap out of you. They're good at it.  
> Matt: As long as he doesn't cause trouble, he should be okay.  
> Karen: Does helping us count as causing trouble?  
> [...]  
> Matt: You're the one who took Punjabi. 
> 
> The poem Vanessa mentions is a hymn to Nemesis, Goddess of Vengeance and daughter of Justice, written by Mesomedes in the early 2nd century CE.
> 
> I believe the sort of program encryption Karen is talking about is, indeed, possible, and have asked around in my circle of CS friends to confirm this, but if there is a mistake, please let me know. 
> 
> I headcanon Santino as being part of the Rising Tide. 
> 
> YES. To those of you who know who I mean by Manfredi, I _do_ headcanon Vanessa as the daughter of Silvio Manfredi, AKA Silvermane, AKA a godfather of Marvel's Mafia, the Maggia. He's an enemy of Spider-Man, generally, though he shows up in Daredevil as well. Vanessa is her middle name; Marianna is her mother's first name, which she modified into a surname to distance herself from Silvio and his bullshit. 
> 
> (UGH OKAY I PICKED UP A COPY OF THE FIRST FIVE ISSUES OF THE MAN WITHOUT FEAR AND I AM
> 
> I AM DEAD
> 
> MATT)
> 
> (it's so weird to see him in the comics with reddish hair because I haven't read these in forever and I g _enuinely forgot that Matt Murdock is a ginger_ I feel so ashamed of myself)
> 
> ALSO CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW GORGEOUS ELODIE YUNG WILL BE AS ELEKTRA YOU GUYS
> 
> I WANT TO TALK ABOUT ELODIE YUNG


	24. Samson and Delilah

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow. Okay. So the epilogue is like. As long as a regular chapter.
> 
> /shrugs
> 
> I cannot express how thankful I am for you all. I'm so proud and awed and overwhelmed and just...amazed at how much love I've received, how many messages you've sent me and friends I've made, and it's just...it's so completely astounding to me. 
> 
> I have no idea what else to say.

**The Urich Report (@theurichreport):** NYPD sources confirm new set of hoods centered in and around Hell’s Kitchen, NYC.  tur.co/… #daredevil #lilith @maskwatchnyc

**Hero Finders** **(@maskwatchnyc)** : @theurichreport Any more info?

 **The Urich Report (@theurichreport)** : @maskwatchnyc If you play Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’ at full blast they’ll come running. But otherwise no. #daredevil #lilith #askmenoquestions

 **Victor ManCHA (@lamanchaman)** : @theurichreport you speak lies

 **RooKate (@archersdoitbetter)** : @lamanchaman @theurichreport You should know better than to believe a reporter.

 **The Urich Report (@theurichreport)** : @archersdoitbetter Remind me to revoke your internet privileges.

.

.

.

Another lie that books tell you: you can sleep for three days in a row.

Human beings aren’t programmed to sleep more than eighteen hours at a time, naturally. (Sleeping pills, aggressive assault, and/or drug blackouts are another matter entirely, but she digresses.) Darcy is out for fourteen before she finally stumbles out of bed (her own bed in her own apartment with her own mugs in the cupboard, and it’s so novel that she can’t help but remember Claire, and the sheer wonder of buying perishable food and knowing that she’ll be around to use it before it’s wasted). Jen’s still in her PJs, even though it’s probably four in the afternoon, and Darcy sits and blinks at her for a minute or two before realizing that Jen’s probably tired, too. They’re _all_ tired, for reasons that are more than understandable. It doesn’t keep her from feeling more than a little guilty for it.

Also hungover, because apparently sleeping that much makes you feel that way. Who knew.

“Hey,” she says, finally, and Jen curls closer around her coffee mug. Her hair’s up in a messy bun, and Darla’s perched on her knee, giving Darcy a glassy, furious look with her evil yellow eyes. She’s fairly certain Darla knows _exactly_ whose fault it is that she had to be uprooted from her private domain, and transported to a place Darcy Cannot Know About Due To Legal Paperwork. Because apparently _that’s_ a thing. (It narrows down where Jen could have gone, really, to places with large government budgets or big corporate secrets, and she’s not sure which of these options freaks her out more. She hasn’t asked, simply because she’s too tired to nag yet.)

“Hey,” says Jen, and peeks at her over the top of her freaky-ass rimless glasses. The frames haven’t changed since Darcy first moved in, when she was fifteen and Jen twenty-five. Ten years later, they still scare the shit out of her. “You sleep okay?”

Not really. She’s not sure she’s ever going to sleep _okay_ , or _well,_ or even really _deeply_ anymore. But she slept, and she slept fairly consistently for a whole fourteen hours even with a thunderstorm screaming bloody murder outside, so she nods. “Yeah.” Some nightmares, but those are inescapable. “You?”

Jen makes a face. “My arms hurt.”

Darcy blinks. “Why do your arms hurt?”

“Idiots who want to disprove _Mythbusters._ ” She closes her lips tight up, and scratches Darla’s head for a bit before pushing her glasses back up her nose. “When did Matt leave?”

Darcy stares at Jen for a heartbeat, then two, and then decides not to lie. Jen can always tell when she’s lying, anyway. _Goddammit._ “We’re going to talk about you having read him the riot act _four years ago_. When _nothing had happened._ Because you are a terrible person.”

Jen snorts. “It eventually b-became relevant. I rest my case.”

“Objection, your honor,” says Darcy, because she can’t avoid the lawyer jokes, okay, she knows like a million of them and she enjoys them with the same sort of fervent glee that a masochist enjoys picking out a whip. ( _What does a lawyer have in common with sperm? About a one in three million chance of becoming a human being!_ ) “I think he left a few hours ago. I wasn’t…really awake.”

She was, just enough to feel him press his mouth to her hair before slipping away. He’d said something about St. Patrick’s, so she assumes he went in for confession, or priest time, or whatever it is that the Catholics call it. She’s pretty sure he’ll be back in an hour or two, but she hasn’t heard from him—doesn’t have a phone _to_ hear from him, which is…probably something she should fix—so who knows precisely what he’s doing right now.

“I thought I heard the door shut. Was I asleep when he came in, or…?”

She hadn’t been, but then again, Matt had come in through the window. The one person they seem to have kept that information from, though, is Jen, and so Darcy nods once. “He couldn’t sleep, he said. I hope it’s okay.”

“Darcy, I think all three of you would sleep here at least once a week during college. And law school, after you moved back in.” Jen gives her a long, considering look. In the other room, the TV starts to babble, which means Karen’s awake, too. “N-Not to mention how easily you seem to adopt strays.”

She adopts strays because she _is_ a stray, because Jen showed her how to do it. Darcy doesn’t say it, but she thinks Jen knows. “It’s different, that’s all.”

Jen nods, as if this is just the answer she was expecting. “Do you know if he’s c-coming back tonight?”

“Jen, just because me and Matt—” she stops, waves a hand, and starts again. “—you know. Just because this is…what it is now, he’s not moving in here or anything. He has his own place.”

Which she’d called home, less than a week ago. Something in Jen’s apartment makes her feel too large for her own skin, now, as if somehow she’s grown beyond it, and the thought fills her with an incredible sadness. She doesn’t quite fit here anymore, and it took a gun, a vigilante, and a handful of near-death experiences to make her that way. She thinks Jen might know that, too, because when she peeks at Jen out of the corner of her eye, there’s a strange, almost sad, mostly proud look on her face. It’s almost like what Foggy’s mom had looked like, when they’d graduated law school. Sad and joyful and exasperated and just—loving, all at once. Like Jen’s suddenly looking at someone completely new in the space where Darcy used to be.

“No, I know,” says Jen, and Darcy snaps out of it.  “B-But now that we’re all fairly free of death threats, I expect he’ll be around more often.” She points at Darcy with her mug. “You behave.”

This is, possibly, even more excruciating than the time Darcy had mentioned to Jen that she’d lost her virginity in sophomore year of high school, and Jen had actually _dragged_ her to the OBGYN for a pap smear, because she’d never had one before, and _STDs happen, Darcy, Jesus_. She opens her mouth. Closes it again. “Oh my _god_ , Jennifer. We’re not going to be having like…crazy wild animal sex on the fucking doorstep. You don’t have to worry about getting your precious beauty sleep ruined.”

“Thank you, for th-that image.”

“I mean, we haven’t—” She stops, because Jen’s looking around with a face like a picture, and starts again. “You don’t have to worry about walking in on something right now, that’s all I’m saying.”

Jen stares at her for a moment, and then says, smugly, “Brett owes me money.”

“Oh my god, _even Brett is in on this?_ ” She wants to tear out her own hair. “Jesus Christ, what did he bet, that we’d tear each other’s clothes off before Fisk was even in prison?”

“Actually he bet you’d had some sort of weird sexual m-misadventure in college, but nobody was really sure. Except Foggy, and me, because we know you.” Jen drops Darla on the dining table (they’ve long since given up the fight to keep the cat off of any surface she wants to be on; they just clean more) and then stands, taking another coffee mug out of the dishwasher. “So Brett owes me money and I intend to collect. The question stands, b-by the way.”

“There was a question?”

She flicks water at Darcy with her fingernails. “Have you guys talked about this yet, or has it been shoved under the r-rug like everything else has been lately?”

Darcy gives Jen a beady look. “You’ve been talking to Karen.”

“A little.” She pours coffee, adds milk and sugar. “T-Trauma can do funny things to people, Darcy. Obviously I’m not saying that’s what this is, because I th-think we’ve all known for years that it’d come to this eventually—”

“—everybody keeps _saying that_ and I can’t decide between being depressed for being terribly obvious or mad that _nobody told me they shipped us—_ ”

“—but I wanted t-to ask you.” Jen sits down again, pushes the coffee across the table. “You’re sure you want this? It’s—it’s not just b-because you thought one of you would die.”

She’s shaking her head before Jen’s even finished, wrapping her good hand around the mug and pulling it close to herself, a weapon or a shield, she’s not sure. “No.” She tastes old lipstick on her teeth. “No, it’s not. You don’t have to worry about that, Jen. Not—it’s not like that.” Because it’s not. Because it’s _not._ The near death, that had brought things to a head that had maybe been building for a lot longer than she’d ever thought they had, maybe they’d been the catalyst, but it’s not why this happened. She knows that much, at least.  “It’s not just because—it’s not.”

Jen searches her face. Then she nods, once. “Okay.”

“And I know Matt’s not your favorite and that it’s probably—what.” She blinks. “Just okay?”

“J-Just okay.”

“You’re serious?”

Jen leans back into her chair, eyes crinkling. “Yeah, I’m serious. I’m aro, Darcy, not completely incapable of recognizing the various intensities of human emotion.”

It sounds bitchy, but she says it nicely, so Darcy nods. “No, I know.” Part of the reason why Jen doesn’t talk to her dad anymore is her coming out as ace-aro. Also her mom’s death and other things, but mostly because of the ace-aro thing. “But like—seriously, that’s the only thing you’re gonna say?”

“Are you happy?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“You’re being safe?”

 _Not particularly._ But she’s managed to keep that last piece from Jen so far. And even with everything that’s happened, she’s not—she doesn’t want Jen to be put in that position. Not as part of the DA’s office. “As safe as I can be when the world’s the way it is.”

“And Foggy’s okay with it?”

She nods, wordless.

“Then no, I have nothing else to say.” Jen gets up, presses her mouth to Darcy’s scalp, and then tips her head towards the living room. Rain batters the windows, unending. “I think K-Karen found the _Jurassic Park_ DVD. Coming?”

“Of course I am. You’re tempting me with dinosaurs.” She catches Jen’s wrist, pulls her back. Darcy wraps her arms around Jen’s waist, hiding her cheek against the soft fabric of her sleep shirt. “Thank you,” she says. “For just—for all of it, Jen. Thank you.”

She hears Jen’s stomach gurgle a little, wonders if Jen’s eaten. Then Jen bends over her, resting her chin on the top of Darcy’s head. A strand of hair falls out of her bun and tickles at Darcy’s cheek. “If you get hurt because of this, I reserve the r-right to be the first person to string him up by his toenails from the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“That’s distinctly unsanitary-sounding, I wouldn’t do that.”

“It’s my right and I reserve it.” Jen squeezes her, just breathing for a moment. Then she lifts her head. “Come on. I think the velociraptors are eating the poor construction worker, and I like seeing the hand slip through Zaeed’s elbow.”

“Jen, his name—his name’s not Zaeed. Zaeed is a video game character.”

“I am aware of this. I just say it b-because it irritates you.” Jen takes Darcy’s coffee, and slips into the living room before Darcy can respond. Darla, on the dining table, crouches down, her little kitty shoulders rolling the way lion shoulders do in the wild before going after an antelope. Darcy stares at the cat, and Darla stares back.

“Your life is so easy,” Darcy tells Darla. Darla blinks once, slowly, and then sashays out of the room after Jen. Which, speaking of: “Jennifer, you’re giving me half of those winnings.”

“Fuck no,” says Jen. “Get your own bet going.”

 _Jurassic Park_ finishes. Darcy showers, and keeps her eyes closed and her forehead pressed to the cool tile. It keeps hitting her over and over, a sudden, sharp strike of memory. _It’s over. Fisk is gone._ It’s done, but it’s not done, because her arm still aches and she still snapped awake this afternoon with a scream caught between her teeth. There are still people to find, still people to stop. There’s still Lilith. There’s still Daredevil. But Fisk is gone, and unless he breaks out of federal custody, unless the unthinkable happens, there’s nothing left for her to really hide from anymore.

_And now come the days of the nuclear fallout._

She doesn’t know what to do, now, she realizes, and she knocks her head to the wall, once, twice. She’s always been good at just sucking it up and moving forward, but now there’s nowhere to move. They’re not going anywhere, they’re not aiming for anything, they’re not racing against time or trying to keep someone alive or chasing shadows in the dark. This is the fallout, and she doesn’t want it. It leaves her too much time to think about things that haven’t been said, problems that haven’t been solved. Like the man who hired the sniper to start an intra-yakuza gang war. Like where Vanessa Marianna went. Like what she and Matt are, and what they might not be. Like Lilith.

She gets shampoo on her eyes accidentally-on-purpose, and thinks about that instead for a while.

Karen has just put _The Fellowship of the Ring_ into the laptop (just adding to the proof that Karen Page is an actual _crazy person_ when it comes to comfort movies, and that’s Darcy talking) when there’s a knock, and Darcy heaves herself up out of the tangle to let Matt in. Seeing him with the guiding cane is almost jarring, past and present overlaid. He looks like he’s just clambered out of the Hudson, his hair just barely on the damp side of soaked, water actually pouring off his coat onto the doormat, and even with the storm, it makes her just—stare. All at once, the whole of her insides turn upside-down and backwards, knotting up in a way that’s deliciously painful. “Oh my god,” she says, and pulls him in before he can say anything. “You _walked_ here? From St. Patrick’s? There’s a fucking thunderstorm outside, Matthew. You’re—you’re going to catch a chill and die or something, I don’t even know.”

“Needed the air.”

“Air or water? Because I feel like walking out there would lead to people actually drowning.”

He’s dripping on their carpet, hair plastered to his temples, raindrops still running down the back of his collar. The grin he gives her is cheeky and completely unrepentant. “I like the rain.”

He says it oddly, as if the words have a different heft to them. And yeah, when she thinks about it, heavy rainfall, a cacophony of water drops hitting every available surface, rebounding, plinking, striking; it would help. He’d be able to sense more than ever, in the rain. Maybe it’s his chance to almost see the city the way he used to, and of course he’d walk in that. Of course he’d want to. She touches his wrist with two fingers. He’s damp and clammy and so pleased with himself that she’s fighting a smile. “And when you die of pneumonia, we’ll put it on your tombstone. _Matt Murdock: a reckless idiot who liked the rain too much._ ”

“Hah.” He’s almost _gleeful_ , and she hasn’t seen this side of Matt in so long that she’d almost forgotten it existed. “Better way to die than most.”

Better than a bullet or a knife or poison. Better than violence. When she looks up at him again, she stops. She’s so far from prepared for this. She doesn’t have a clue what to do. When Fisk was out there, they could just keep running, not really have to think about—about _this_ , and _them_ , and _us._ But Fisk is done, now. Vanessa is gone. And here’s Matt, soaking wet, still covered in bruises, but smiling at her like she’s done something amazing and the only thing she wants to do is run again. Maybe towards him. Maybe away.

“Since when have you been playing D&D with my confessor?” says Matt, and the spell breaks. Darcy reaches up to card hair out of his eyes.

“I mean, technically I haven’t started yet. And it’s not like he can tell me any dirty secrets that I don’t already know.”

“That should concern me more than it does.”

She realizes, in that moment, that Jen’s watching them, and thinks, yeah. She’s gonna kill Jen a little bit. Matt leans his cane up against the wall beside the umbrella stand. His glasses are slipping down his nose (seriously, he’s completely dripping wet right now) and there are raindrops still clinging to his eyelashes. Darcy glances over her shoulder, and cocks an eyebrow at Jen. “What, Jen?”

Jen looks them over for just a moment. “Matthew. Did you go swimming?”

“In a manner of speaking,” says Matt, and his shit-eating lawyer look is back on his face. He and Jen love ribbing each other, for reasons that Darcy will probably never understand. It’s hella entertaining, though. “How were your sick days?”

“Terrible.” Jen doesn’t elaborate. “Just don’t drip on my p-paperwork, kids.”

“Go drip on your own paperwork,” says Darcy, and Jen snorts before vanishing back into the living room. Cate Blanchett is talking about _one ring to rule them all_. Darcy pulls the living room door shut (basically every room in their apartment has a door attached, including the ones you wouldn’t expect; it’s so weird) before looking up at Matt again. “You have mud on your cheek.”

“I know.” He doesn’t wipe it off. “Karen?”

“Watching movies. I think they’re helping, though I don’t know why _Lord of the Rings_ is a comfort movie. Come to think of it, I don’t know why _Psycho_ is a comfort movie either, really, but I mean, it’s mine. Like _Jurassic Park._ And _Jaws._ All my comfort movies are terrible.” She’s babbling, which is dumb. “Jen says she’s going to hang you from the Brooklyn Bridge by your toenails if you do anything that might be somehow construed as injurious to my person or my mental state.”

“Not as bad as I was expecting.”

“What the hell were you expecting?”

He shrugs. More rainwater drips off the end of his nose. “Maybe the electric chair. It sounds extraordinarily unpleasant.”

“Come on, punkycat,” she says, and when she holds out her hand (she doesn’t even think about it, she just reaches and he reaches back, almost in the same moment) Matt hooks his fingers through hers. “I don’t think you’d enjoy pneumonia. I’ve heard it sucks some major ass.”

Before, she would have dragged his clothes out of her closet, given them to him, and wandered off to do something else, probably watch _Lord of the Rings_ with Karen and Jen. Now, she just lingers on the edge of her bed while Matt’s in the bathroom, her knees pressed tight together and her fingers twined in the hem of her blanket. She’s not sure what to do, really. If she were college!Darcy she’d have made a dumb sex joke and escaped by now. If she were law school!Darcy, she’d probably be right there in the bathroom with him, possibly taking his clothes off, possibly helping him put fresh ones on, possibly saying, _fuck clothes, screw me in the shower right now_ —which…this image she is more than okay with, but it is the _wrong time_. And wow, apparently she’s now mature enough to know when dragging sex into something is a bad idea.

_When this is over, we’re going somewhere she won’t be able to interrupt. No phones, no computers, nothing. And we’re not leaving until I’m absolutely certain I know every sound you can make._

“Fuck,” she says, aloud, because yeah, that was—that’s a thing that happened. And she doesn’t know, precisely, when that will be _happening_. Or if it will be happening. Because this newfound mature streak (— _did that show up the first time someone tried to kill me, or when I was duct-taped to a chair, or when I walked into the interrogation room and saw Karen Page looking back at me with blood under her fingernails—_ ) is in control at the moment, and is nagging at her with the idea that it’d probably be a good idea to actually…talk about stuff before le sexytimes.

Which she’s not good at. She’s good at talking. She’s not good at talking about _things_.

( _God, you’re such a middle schooler, Lewis._ )

Matt knocks on her door, because he always knocks (she’s not sure where that comes from, considering she’d given up knocking on his and Foggy’s dorm room door about three weeks into their friendship, because neither of them gave a shit) and stops just over the threshold, cocking his head at her. His hair is still soaking wet, and the clothes she’d spotted him—thieved from him ages ago, back when they were in college—are apparently now too small for the muscles in his shoulders, because the fabric’s straining a bit at the seams up there. Which isn’t _fair_. “What,” Matt says, and judging by the way his eyebrows are lifting he knows _exactly_ what. She’s not giving him the credit for that one.

“I’m pretty sure the point of you changing your clothes was to get dry, not to let your hair drip all over everything.” Still, she stands, and tugs on the hem of his shirt with her good hand, curling her fingers into the soft fabric. She finally gets why guys get all hot and bothered to see their girlfriends (Jesus, so heteronormative) in their clothes. Because technically even though she stole them from Matt in the first place, these are _her_ clothes, and that marks him in the weirdest way. It’s actually a million kinds of awesome. “You should probably fix that.”

“Probably,” says Matt. He’s not wearing his glasses, and it touches her the same way it always does, that he takes them off around her. It’s really dumb, how the little things keep piling up and squashing her under a mess of fluff. Like tribbles, but with warm fuzzies around her aorta. He touches his fingertips to the edge of the bruises on her throat, soft as a kiss. “What is it?”

“Blah.” She grabs a towel off the back of her desk chair and drops it on his head. It’s only after she lets it go that she remembers this is the towel she used to dry off after her shower earlier, and she’s—really not sure if that was appropriate. “Blah things.”

Matt just stands there for a moment. It’s as if she’s made a slit in a seam in him, somewhere, and there’s—there’s _something_ leaving him. She’s just not sure what it is, but she doesn’t want it to go. She _likes_ this Matt, loves this Matt, wants this Matt to stay with her just as much as she wants lawyer!Matt and devil!Matt to stay with her, and she clenches her hand into a fist around the hem of his shirt before she even realizes what she’s doing. “Don’t. It’s—it’s not you, okay, you didn’t do anything, and nothing happened. I’m just—I’m freaking out over dumb things. That’s all.”

He tips his head. Water drips onto her wrist. “Dumb things?”

“God, sometimes—” She stops, starts again. “Nothing happened. I guess—I guess it kind of all hit me in the head at once and I’m having a slight freak-out because I _told_ you I don’t know how to do these things. I think the longest relationship I had before Eduardo was with cigarettes.”

Matt nods once. The longest relationship she can remember him having was with Elektra, and that had been six full months. For some people that’s nothing, miniscule, but for Matt Murdock, that was tantamount to a full-on marriage proposal. Though honestly, the Elektra Darcy remembers wouldn’t have been amenable to a proposal of any sort. _Free spirit, that girl,_ Darcy thinks. Tall, dark, high cheekbones. Wild, almost. _Dark and snarky. Matt Murdock has a type._ Which pleases her, somehow.

(Isn’t she supposed to be jealous of Elektra, or something? She’s not sure. Is that how these things work? Honestly, Darcy just remembers an absolute spitfire of a lady who hadn’t treated Darcy like shit, like some of Matt’s other girlfriends. They’d actually been more than halfway to being friends before everything had gone down. So, basically, there’s no way she’s going to hate Elektra. Like, ever.)

“Anyway.” She swallows. “I just—I don’t want to fuck up, okay? But I fuck everything up basically and this is—this is something I want to keep…not fucked up. And I don’t know if you want to stay the way I want you to stay and it’s really unsettling because apparently I’m irrationally needy and _wow_ , that was a bunch of stuff I didn’t mean to say.” She takes a huge gulp of air. “Bottom line is I am having feels and you can’t make me talk about them. Not even with your dumb face.”

Something she really loves about Matt is that regardless of how he acts as the devil, he doesn’t just instantly respond when people lay their hearts out to be stomped on. (Because that’s what she’s done. In a terribly roundabout way, but yeah, she did that. Look at her being so super mature about things, baring all her soft places because she can’t think of anything else to do, can’t imagine doing anything else. She’s already shown every other bruise and scar and open wound. This is just another, and _goddammit_ , Darcy, don’t get weird about this.) He scruffs the towel over his head for about thirty seconds, hiding his face, just thinking. It’s only once he’s folded the towel into a neat rectangle (which is so different from how she does things, she literally just throws her shit everywhere, _how are they compatible_ ) and combed his hair back out of his eyes (which is a useless gesture, but maybe it tickles, who knows?) that he says, “You’re panicking.”

“No shit I’m panicking.” Apparently he _can_ make her talk about feels with his dumb face. Darcy catches his hand, lifts it, starts playing with his fingers because it’s easier than looking at him. “You know me, Matt, you realize how fucking scary that is? You know all the weird things about me and how—all the shit that I’ve never told anybody, ever. We’ve been friends for seven years, and if—if we mess up somehow, I don’t—I don’t want to _lose_ that. I don’t want to lose you, or Foggy, or—or have this implode somehow and make us all break apart, and apparently everyone has been waiting for this to happen and I never picked up on it, which is weird? And then I don’t want to—I don’t want to make it hard on Foggy or on either of us, and I don’t—it was easier when we had other things to think about.” She’s rushing, trying to get it all out before she loses her nerve or her tongue or her train of thought, and Matt just stands and absorbs it, just stands and listens, his eyes half-lidded. “Not that—not that I don’t want to think about this, because obviously I _do_ want to think about this, but it’s just—I’m not good at this.” She takes a tremendous breath. _Come on, Darcy. Get it out. Don’t be a baby._ “And—and I don’t know. I don’t—” _understand why you’re still here_ “—I’m just scared that now that everything’s calmed down it’s—it’s going to be different. And yeah, it’ll be different, but I don’t mean different, I mean _different_ , and I don’t—I meant what I said, after what happened with Fisk. I don’t—I just…”

She stops. _I need you here,_ she thinks, and squeezes his hand hard. She can’t quite say it, can’t quite manage it. Not without a broken throat and terror and darkness. So she digs her nails in and says, very quietly, “I don’t want to lose this.”

“This?”

“All of this,” she says, and by _all_ she means Nelson, Murdock & Lewis; she means Matt in her room looking at her through still-damp eyelashes; she means the devil touching her cheek on a moonlit rooftop; she means the curve of his mouth against hers in the dark. “All of it. I don’t—I don’t want to lose this.”

Matt heaves a little sigh, and bends into her. His hair is cold against her temple. (Hers is damp, too, but his is chilly enough to give her goosebumps.) Darcy rests her cheek against his shoulder, closing her eyes. He smells like her laundry detergent, and there’s a bad bruise just underneath the worn collar of his/her shirt, one that’s almost black with how much blood has pooled underneath the skin. They’re both quiet for a time.

“If I remember right,” he says, quietly, “it was Eduardo that fucked up, not you.”

“No, I know.” She shakes her head. Her glasses push into her bruised nose. “That’s not—Eduardo was an asshole and I was an idiot. But like—I’m not _good_ at this. I don’t do well at this. I don’t do _this—_ ” she touches his sternum, the line of his ribs “—at all, because I don’t—I don’t like talking about things. And it’s not a good habit, but, you know, I’m so good at having good habits.”

“Darcy,” says Matt, less irritated than amused, “who are you talking to?”

“That’s different. You didn’t tell me about Daredevil because you didn’t want me to get hurt—which is _dumb_ and you know it, but still. I’m—I just don’t talk about things because it’s easier not to.”

Matt snorts.

“Don’t laugh at me, it’s true.”

“Darcy, you talk more than anybody I know, and that includes Foggy.”

“But I don’t really _say_ anything,” she says, and yeah, this might—actually be worse than talking about Eli, because there’s her worst foible slit out of her and left on the ground for someone else to see. Matt opens his mouth, and then closes it again, because honestly, it’s true. She talks a lot, she’s good at talking a lot, but when she talks, she’s not actually speaking. It’s all snark and glib references, and she’s okay with that most of the time. She’s just not sure that works really well in regards to stuff like this.

“So yeah. Of course I’m panicking.” She taps at his thumbnail with her own, frowning at the blood blister. “How are you not panicking?”

“I am.” Matt rests his chin on her head. “I’m just doing it very, very quietly. It’s like that thing you told me about, on the internet.”

“Screaming internally?”

“Sure, that works.”

That helps, a little. Darcy closes her eyes, lets out a sharp breath through her nose. “So we’re both completely hopeless goobers, is what you’re saying.”

He scoffs, but he doesn’t deny this. Darcy rolls her eyes up to the ceiling, pushes back a little. “I thought the squishy emotional discussions was your job, Murdock. You’re _failing_ me.”

“I think you’re overestimating me. I’ve never been all that great at these.”

“But you’re so good at them in the mask,” she says, and Matt pinches her hip for that one. Darcy yips in spite of herself, and rocks into him. When Matt lifts his hand to her hair, twisting his fingers through it, she closes her eyes. Fuck him for being so soothing. She’s Darcy Lewis. She can do anything and everything she wants, flying completely solo. She’s not supposed to want another person to be around so goddamn much.

“What if something happens?” she says, after a time. Outside, the rain keeps pouring. “What if you get hurt, or I get hurt? What if—what if we have a fight and make it hard, at the firm, with Foggy, with—with everyone. What if something happens?”

Matt turns his face to hers. “It might,” he says. “But it might do that even if we weren’t—what we are.”

“I know.” Every relationship comes with some sort of trouble, whether it’s friendship or romantic or familial or what have you. For god’s sake, she left home at fifteen because her mother punched her, she _knows_ that. But those sorts of relationships—she doesn’t regret leaving her mother because Lorna stopped being her mother around the same time Eli died. She _would_ regret doing anything, anything at all, to hurt Matt or Foggy or Jen or Karen or anyone else they’ve collected. She’d want to kill anyone who hurt them. Hard thing to do, if the person hurting them is her. “I just—I don’t want to ruin this. And I’m just not—I’m not good, at these things. I don’t—I don’t want to fuck up.”

She’s not counting anything that could happen with Daredevil and Lilith. She thinks they’ve gone over that, and besides: whether or not she feels guilty, whether or not one of them gets hurt or bleeds or even comes close to dying, that’s something they’ll be talking about forever. It’s probably something they’ll be _fighting_ about forever, even when she can throw a punch, because they’re both too fucking stubborn not to. No, what she’s counting is all the shit that she can never say and all the millions of terrible ways this could go wrong and destroy everything that’s come to matter to her, even if she has no idea if any of those things will happen, or even how a relationship between her and Matt would _work_ , considering they work together and run a firm together and they’ve been in each other’s pockets since they were eighteen years old, and holy shit. How do people _do_ adult relationships? How is that a thing that people ever manage?

“You’re not going to fuck this up,” says Matt, and she rubber-bands back into the moment. “Honestly, if anyone’s going to fuck anything up it’ll probably be me.”

He says it in a joking way, but the way his mouth presses thin, after—that’s not something she likes. “Are we going to have a competition as to who can mess up more sooner?”

“That sounds like a bad idea.” He rests his hand on the winged dagger at the back of her neck, and all at once she realizes what she wants the devil’s mark to be. A cross, but not like a Catholic cross. Even all the way around, like an X shifted ninety degrees. She thinks it’s something the Knights Templar used. As deep a red as she can make it without turning it black. It’s not complete, but the image, even half-sketched, is so sharp and strong that she can’t argue with it. A Templar cross at the small of her spine. “I told you, if—if you think this isn’t something you can handle, then I would understand.”

“And _I_ told _you_ that I’m not—I’m not scared. I just…don’t like not knowing how things work.” She sighs, and touches the backs of her fingers to his cheek, to the bones and bruises. “Your turn.”

“My turn?”

“You know what’s worrying me, now.” Darcy drops down onto the end of her bed. “Now we need to work out what’s worrying you.”

“Other than the obvious?”

“If by the obvious you mean worrying I’m going to end up dead, then yeah. Other than the obvious.”

He stands, just for a moment longer. Then he turns, and settles himself in her desk chair. Her fingers are itching with the desperate need to fix his hair. It’s every which way, so completely out of character that it’d be almost frightening, if not for the fact that she knows how he messes with it when he’s thinking. Matt closes his eyes, and sits ramrod straight, as if he’s back in Sunday school. “Well. Then there’s the obvious. And—all the things you said, those too.”

“And?”

His eyelashes flicker against his cheek. Then Matt shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does.”

“Darcy.”

“It _does_.” She reaches out, takes his hand. “It does matter, Matt. You’re worried. If you don’t want to tell me, then—then don’t tell me, that’s fine, but if you’re not telling me because you think it’ll freak me out or whatever, then—no. That’s not something we can do. Okay?”

Matt presses his lips tight together. When she runs her thumb down the line of his fingers, he turns his hand palm-side up, and touches his fingertip to the pulse in her wrist. “I’m no better at this than you,” he says, slowly, as if he’s chipping the words out in stone. “I was serious, before. If either of us is more likely to ruin this, it’s me. And I can’t—I can’t afford that. Not now that I know what it’s like to have it.”

“Oh.” Darcy blinks. Then she slips off the bed, lifts her hand to his cheek. He hasn’t shaved, today. His jaw scrapes against her skin. “Matt.”

“I don’t know why it’s hard for you to believe it,” Matt says, soft, “but I love you. No matter what happened, I never—that never really stopped. I might not have always recognized it, didn’t always know it for what it was, but I _always_ loved you. Right from the start, it was always there, in the back of my head, and I told myself that it wasn’t the—I didn’t want to ruin what the three of us had, with that. And then it all started, and I didn't want to ruin _you,_ either. Not with what I do. And I—” He stops. Takes a breath. “But it’s different, now. Nothing good happens to me, Darcy. Nothing like this _ever_ happens, not in a way that lasts. And if I lose you, it might—”

He stops. _Losing you might kill me,_ he’d said, when they were both still bloody. She doesn’t know how to tell him that it’s the same for her, that losing him would destroy her. She doesn’t know what to say, so she just takes a shaky breath and blurts out the first thing that comes to mind. “Stay here tonight.”

Matt angles his head into her hand.

“I mean, only if you want to. It’s not—you don’t have to, and I know that you probably have work and everything—” technically she does too, but she’s not entirely sure she’s up for putting the Lilith suit so soon after everything that’s happened, when she’s still so tired and aching and frustrated with herself “—and it’s not like—yeah, this is—we need to talk about this, and Jen is here, and Karen, and I know that you probably want to go home after the past everything and all the shit that’s been going on, but I can’t leave Jen right away and I just—but I just—I don’t know.”

Feelings are dumb. They’re like empty eggshells. Light and delicate and so fucking breakable that she’s terrified, always. She really doesn’t enjoy the thought of being so easily shattered. Maybe this is why people turn to religion. Maybe this is what it means, to take a leap of faith.

He blinks once, slowly. Then Matt covers her hand with his, tugs, just a bit, and Darcy settles herself over his lap, her arm around his shoulder. She thinks he’s listening to her heartbeat. Matt tips her chin up, and kisses her—not her mouth, but her cheek, where the bruises lie, so carefully that it makes her want to cry. Darcy’s lips part, her eyes falling closed, and Matt kisses her again, on her other cheek. Then her temple. Then the very edge of her mouth, so, so lightly, barely a kiss at all.

“I wasn’t planning on going anywhere else,” he says, and that’s that. There are lots of other things that they have to say, so many eventualities they need to talk about, but here and now, that’s that.

“Well,” Darcy replies. “Good.”

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 **The Urich Report (@theurichreport):** New footage released of #lilith and unknown archer at @ConfedGlobal; Lilith’s role in the Fisk affair debated. tur.co/…

 **Daily Bulletin (@dailybulletinnyc)** : Questions raised in regards to the identity of the masked archer filmed in the @ConfedGlobal attack Saturday night. dbl.co/…

 **Hero Finder (@maskwatchnyc):** @dailybulletinnyc Personally we’re calling her #hawkgal

 **Queen Nico (@mini_nico)** : @dailybulletinnyc @maskwatchnyc How about just #hawkeye it’s not like she’s not just as badass because she happens to have boobs

 **RooKate (@archersdoitbetter):** @mini_nico can we be best friends 5ever plz

 **Queen Nico (@mini_nico):** @archersdoitbetter follow me on Tumblr deadqueennico.tumblr.com

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“I don’t know,” Kate says. “I think it makes my butt look huge.”

Darcy looks up over the edge of her laptop. She’s perched on Kate’s couch in the obnoxiously expensive apartment next to Central Park, her head itching with henna and dye (goodbye, streaks), a copy of backup generator open in one half of the screen, a PDF of their official suit against the NYPD in the other.

“Isn’t the point of the super-suits?” She cocks an eyebrow. “To make your butt look huge?”

Kate snorts. Darcy has no idea where she managed to obtain this suit, or whether or not it’s supposed to look like a clubbing unitard from the future, but it does make Kate’s butt look—well, it makes her look like she actually has a butt. Which could be good _or_ bad, depending on what she’s aiming for. It also makes her look totally badass. She frowns a little, closing her computer and setting it to the side. “If you leave your arm uncovered like that people could get at arteries.”

“But I can’t shoot as fast if I have to worry about getting a sleeve caught in my bowstring.” She turns her hand palm-up. Kate gives Darcy a carefully sharp look, and then her lips quirk. “We can’t all be stone-cold badasses with heavy armor because their boyfriends get super worried about paper cuts.”

“Matt wears more armor than I do, so don’t even start.” Also, boyfriend sounds weird, but a) Kate’s nineteen, b) she’s teasing, and c) Darcy hasn’t come up with a better word for it yet. Whatever it really is. She scoots off the couch, twirling her finger. “Turn.”

“Okay, Edna,” says Kate, but she turns on the spot anyway. Her hair’s pulled back into a high ponytail (unsafe, Darcy thinks, makes it easy for people to grab her by the hair, she’ll have to talk to Kate about that) and the earrings in her ears are shaped like thumbtacks. Boots, a wrist-guard. And, of course, it’s purple. Not dark, but not bright, either, just…just purple. “What do you think?”

“I feel like the gaping holes here—” Darcy points at Kate’s hip, her ribs, her upper thigh “—are unnecessary. And also stupidly dangerous, because there’s an artery right here—” she makes a slashing motion over Kate’s thigh “—that will make you bleed out in minutes if it gets nicked. That’s what Claire says, anyway.”

“So no leg scoop, then.” Kate nods, her eyebrows tight. “You—where did you get your suit?”

“Friend.” She needs to go and see Melvin. She hasn’t since Fisk was caught, the first time, and she wants to—she doesn’t know what she wants. She wants to help him, but she doesn’t know if he’ll accept it. Or if he even wants it. “If I’m nice to him he might agree to amend yours, just so you don’t die.”

“Aw, so nice.” Kate tugs absently at the belt around her hips. “So cover these—” she touches the scoop-outs “—with the same black stuff that you use, if I can. Yeah?”

“Good, because that black stuff will probably save your life if you really want to do this.” Darcy blows air out her nose. “You’re really sure you want to, Kate? You’re going to be juggling college and your family and the lawsuit on top of it, and it’s—yeah.”

Kate stares at her for a moment, and then tugs at the hem of her fingerless gloves. Darcy wonders if Marci made good on that promise to wipe Kate’s fingerprints from the state system, or if that’s something O’Reilly’s going to take care of. Probably O’Reilly, if she’s going to be honest. O’Reilly could be a monster, too, if she wanted. “I don’t know.” Kate eyes her, and then shrugs. “It’s not like my dad’s ever around. And Yoko—I talked about it with her. She wants to be Alfred.”

Yoko is amazing. Darcy needs to learn Japanese. She laughs, and then her smile fades, because Kate—Kate’s a blade, and she doesn’t want Kate to end up turning against herself. “You’re doing this for the right reasons?”

Kate scowls, and suddenly they’re in a standoff. “Are you?”

She feels silly, having a staring contest while her hair’s pinned down in plastic wrap. Darcy tugs at her earlobe, wishing she still had her tongue piercing in, so she could clack it against her teeth. “I’m doing it because I need to,” she says, and Kate nods.

“Then yeah. Right reasons.” Kate tugs her lower lip between her teeth, and all of a sudden she’s Kate again, not the blade, not the Valkyrie. Just Kate. “It’s—it’s okay, though, right? The costume. It’s not—it’s not awful or cheesy or anything.”

Darcy gives her another top-to-toe look. Kate has a pair of sunglasses hooked through the collar of her suit, half-folded, as if she’s waiting to head out into sunlight. She’s pale and nervous-looking, purple lipstick rubbing off on her teeth. She gets her blue eyes from her dad, Darcy thinks. The rest of her is her mother. She wonders what Kate’s sister looks like, wonders what sort of woman Kate’s mother was. Kate chews her lip, not quite daring to meet Darcy’s eyes. “You’re staring, it’s weird.”

“Glasses,” says Darcy finally. It’s the same pair of modern, expensive sunglasses that Kate had worn the night they’d gone after Vanessa Marianna. Kate pushes them on, and there it is. She’s all sharp edges and cheekbones, pointed elbows and muscled arms. Darcy nods once.

“Good.”

Kate’s lips peel back from her teeth in the shyest smile Darcy’s ever seen on her. “Good?”

“Damn good, Hawkingbird.”

Kate’s nose wrinkles. “I don’t know if I like that one anymore. I want to come up with something else. Twitter keeps calling me _Hawkgal_ , which is—which is weird. But Hawkeye’s taken, sort of, and every other name I’ve come up with just sounds really dumb—well, even more dumb than Hawkingbird—”

“Wait.” Darcy goes to push her hair behind her ear, and finds plastic instead. “What do you mean, you’re on Twitter?”

“You didn’t notice?” Kate’s eyebrows go up. She pulls the sunglasses off again. “That article Ben dropped on Daredevil and Lilith, the _Bulletin_ and the _Bugle_ both picked it up. There are a lot of hood-junkies in the city, they’re tweeting it all over the place. You’ll be trending soon if it keeps up. ”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Nope, god’s honest truth. Look for yourself if you don’t believe me.” Kate plucks at the fabric of her suit, and then unzips her boots, stepping out of them. Darcy can see purple nail polish through her too-thin socks. “Yeah, #daredevil and #lilith is becoming a thing. I don’t really have one yet—a hashtag, I mean, not a codename—but, you know, I’m kind of okay with that. You’re not going to faint or anything, are you? You look kind of pale.”

“Do you realize,” says Darcy in a shaking voice, “that I have wanted to be a tag on Twitter since I opened an account?”

“Sounds like you.” Kate collects her boots. “Twitter’s like your perfect medium. Short and bitchy.”

“Fuck you, good things come in small packages.”

She waves that off. “But you’re freaking out. Which is weird, because you seemed—you seemed like you were totally into the whole superhero thing.”

“I have had a lot of emotional talks over the past few days. Like, a _lot_ of emotional talks. It’s exhausting.” Darcy follows her, because it’s been long enough that she probably needs to wash her hair out. “I’m just—I don’t know. Every time I look at the suit I wonder if I can manage it again.”

“Putting it back on?”

“Being able to do something good.”

“So you’re, like, having a midlife crisis?” Kate gives her a beady look. “How old are you, again? I should not be more self-actualized than you. You have a real-person job. And lots of tattoos.”

“Shut up, shut your face.” Darcy steps into the bathroom, and Kate follows after her, still holding onto her boots like a lifeline. She starts picking at the plastic behind her ear. “It’s not a crisis. It’s not like I don’t want to do it. I just—don’t know if people would actually _want_ me to do it. I’m not super-special, I don’t have—I’m not an archer like you, I’m not a human radar machine like Matt is. I don’t know how to throw a punch without breaking my own thumb. I feel like I’m a bad option, hero-wise.”

“But people like you,” Kate says. “They want to know more about you.”

“And if I disappoint them, then they’ll hate me, and I’ll have failed someone.” And that’s the most frightening thing, the idea that there will be another Eli, another Kate, someone else that needs help who she won’t reach in time. “It’s just a big thing, I guess.”

Kate watches her peel off the saran wrap for a minute or two. She puts the lid of the toilet down, and perches on the tank, her toes curling against the lip of the bowl. “You do have a superpower,” she says, slowly. Darcy, who’s just turned on the sink, stops and blinks at her. “I mean, it’s not like—it’s not a _super_ superpower, you’re not like…Thor or anything, but you do have something.”

“I’m all ears,” says Darcy, sticking her head under the sink. The henna (stolen from Claire; thanks, Claire) burns sharp in her nose.

“You make people think they can be more,” says Kate. Her voice sounds odd. “You inspire people. It’s—it’s really weird, actually, but like—you remember the first time we went to meet with the Goodmans, and I flipped a shit, after?”

Darcy wouldn’t call it flipping a shit. She’d call it a complete mental breakdown. But Darcy makes a noise anyway, because she can’t really talk with her head in the sink.

“I thought you were going to leave,” Kate says. The words echo over the water. “You know, I started—I started freaking out, screaming, I didn’t know what to do, and I can’t—it was the first time I’d seen Rich since he attacked me, and I just…I don’t know what was even happening to me. But you and Karen were there, and I thought, you know, once I started screaming, I thought you’d just leave me with Yoko. I kind of wanted you to. But you didn’t. You and Karen, you didn’t leave. And at the time I was thinking—well, in the part of me that could think, anyway, I thought it was weird, because you barely knew me, you know? You were just a lawyer.”

Darcy pulls her head out from under the water, groping for the disgusting dye towel she brought from home. Kate presses it into her hands without a word, watches her as she wraps her hair up in it.

“But you didn’t go.” Kate searches her face, and then looks down at her toes again. “You sat there with me the whole time, and you didn’t even really say anything, you were just—you were there. For hours. You didn’t have to, but you did, and you did it again when—down in the archery range, you did it again, and every time you did it you just—you never made me feel like I was worth less, for doing it. You never tiptoed around me, and _everyone_ was tiptoeing. You treated me like a person, and it helped me remember that I was one, not just—not just what Rich did.”

Her ribs feel tight. Darcy swallows hard. “Kate.”

“That’s _powerful_. I don’t think you have any idea how powerful that is. You—I remember reading something online somewhere. _The most broken people are the kindest_ , or something. And it made me think of you, sort of. Because I know for a fact that something happened to you, or—or to someone near you, or something, because you get this look, sometimes, when you think no one’s looking. And you wouldn’t have been able to—” Kate swallows, and meets Darcy’s eyes again. “It’s so—it’s corny, but like, you made me…you help a lot more than you know. Just by treating us like _people_. I was talking to Santino, about those two kids he knows, Tandy and Ty, and—you treat _everyone_ like a person. And that’s so, so important, Darcy, because yeah, the Avengers are great and everything, but it’s the same shit-rolls-downhill stuff that always happens. The little guys get hurt when giants clash, and you—you _care_ about the little guy. You actually genuinely care about the ones nobody ever thinks about, the people who walk the streets because they have nothing else left. People like me, who are different. I mean, I know I have a lot, but—but still. And there are people like Santino and Tandy and Ty, you know, the lonely kids. You treat us like we’re _worth_ something, when other people don’t, and it makes us think that we can try harder, we can be better.” She seems to be groping for a word. “And—I guess, yeah. That’s…that’s a superpower. It’s not a magic hammer or super serum or web-shooters or a mechasuit that does all the work for you, but it’s a superpower anyway. You make us remember that we’re not just wounds and sins and broken pieces, and we need you for that. Not just as Lilith, but as you. And—yeah.”

Her cheeks are wet. Darcy covers her mouth with one hand, trying very hard not to sob, because Kate looks so nervous and twitchy that she might actually fling herself out the nearest window to get away from Darcy if she cries. Kate eyes her warily for a moment or two, and then steps off the toilet (she’s still so goddamn tall, why is she surrounded by tall people, seriously) and wraps Darcy up in a hug. Darcy hiccups twice, squeezing her eyes shut and hoping her towel doesn’t fall off her head. “You’re not supposed to make me cry,” she says, thickly. “You’re terrible. I don’t like crying, it makes me feel like I’m leaking brain cells.”

Kate laughs. “Sorry to make you dumber.”

She doesn’t know how to explain to Kate that she’s wrong. Because Darcy—yeah, Darcy tries, but she’s not that good of a person. She doesn’t _try_ to do things like that. She’s all shattered glass, and she cuts more often than she heals, even when she’s trying hard not to. She’s just—all she is, is her, dorkiness and glasses and so mouthy that she’ll probably get herself killed someday, and she doesn’t understand why people care.

_You’re a firework. You light up the dark places, and make them look like home. That’s why._

“I just want to make things better,” says Darcy, and Kate squeezes her just a little tighter, hooking her chin over Darcy’s shoulder. “I want to make things better for people. I want good people to have nice things. And I don’t know if it’s for me or for them or—or anything, but I want the world to be different. And maybe if I try hard enough I can change a little bit of it, or—or fix one thing. Just one thing. Because I don’t want to run away from things like that anymore.”

She has to be imagining the way the chains burn under her cast, the mark she’s inked into herself, her memories of Eli branded wide across her wrist. Still, she feels it, just like she feels how Kate’s breathing, in and out, deep and slow, completely calm. “Then don’t,” Kate says, and smudges her mouth over Darcy’s forehead. It leaves a streak of purple lipstick behind. She slips away, after, shuffling like she’s embarrassed. Darcy looks at herself in the mirror for a full minute before letting out a breath, and groping for the hair dryer.

When they head down to Battery Park, she leaves Kate with Melvin (the gentlest she’s ever seen Kate, the quietest, and she thinks, _yeah, maybe this will be good for them_ ) and goes to knock on Betsy’s door. Betsy’s wearing the black hijab that Melvin had been working on, when Darcy and Matt had looked in on him. It gleams like obsidian against her skin.

“Can I help you?” she says, and Darcy scratches at the back of her neck. Then she holds out her good hand. Betsy takes it, slowly, her eyes still narrowed.

“Hi,” she says. “I—I don’t know if Melvin’s mentioned me, but my name’s Lilith. I was wondering if I could talk to you for a little bit.”

Betsy’s eyes—a funny shade of hazel, just a hair too close to amber—widen. She looks over at the garage. Then she looks back at Darcy, and Darcy straightens her shoulders and meets her gaze.

“Lilith,” she repeats, slowly. “Mel—Mel said something about you, yes. What do you want?”

“To help,” Darcy says. “If I can.”

Betsy looks at the garage one more time, and then steps aside to let Lilith in.

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 **Queen Nico (@mini_nico)** : #daredevil sighting! 49th and 11th. No sign of #lilith but maybe she’s shy? Want to see her before I leave NY!

 **RooKate (@archersdoitbetter)** : #lilith has her own shit to do more than likely. Strong badass lady don’t need no man. #sorrynotsorrydaredevil @mini_nico

 **Hijabibabi (@betsysy)** : @archersdoitbetter wouldn’t surprise me #ladiesgettingshitdone #sorrynotsorrydaredevil

 **KHAAAAAAAAN (@kamala_k):** Why is it all the good superheroine stuff happens on the other side of the river? @maskwatchnyc @theurichreport

 **Reggie V (@fedorabro):** @theurichreport Highly doubt this chick is around for any reason other than to hang off of #daredevil’s horns. Remember Delilah?

 **RooKate (@archersdoitbetter)** : @fedorabro Like you have a horn to hang off of, big guy? #straightwhiteboystweeting

 **Hijabibabi (@betsysy):** But if they’re the Samson and Delilah of *hell,* doesn’t that mean they’re stronger together, not weaker? @fedorabro @archersdoitbetter

 **RooKate (@archersdoitbetter)** : preach girl @betsysy

 **KHAAAAAAAAN (@kamala_k):** @betsysy @archersdoitbetter #samsonanddelilahofhell trend it ladies

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It’s not as though it’s over then, of course. They still have Hoffman as one of their clients (even if he’s pleading guilty) and there’s Elena’s apartment to think about. Kate’s already basically made Elena her formal representation on the tenement property; she’s not _technically_ the landlord, but the people who still live in the building can go to Elena if they want Kate to have something fixed. And there are a lot of things to be fixed. Foggy’s cousin is so overjoyed to get all those drywall commissions that he sends Nelson, Murdock & Lewis a fruit basket—which is hilarious, because it gets left on the stoop by a lazy mailman, and everything is stolen out of it aside from the plums. 

(According to the list left behind, there was supposed to be chocolate. She’s kind of sad about that.)

Ben doesn’t go back to the _Bulletin._ “It’s not as though they did me any favors,” he says, when they meet up with Ben and Karen at Josie’s a few nights after Vanessa escapes. Darcy (between Foggy and Matt, Matt’s hand linked through hers on her knee) nods. “Seems like all anyone looks for in the big name newspapers nowadays is sexy headlines anyway. Maybe the people of the internet will be more willing to pay attention.”

“They will,” says Karen, because Karen’s always thought that, even when it seems like the people of the internet have had exactly jack shit to say. “Well, if they don’t turn it into furry porn, anyway.”

Ben gives her a sharp look over the top of his glasses, and Karen meets his gaze, unabashed. She’s smiling, which makes Darcy want to smile. Really, it seems like she hasn’t seen _any_ of them smiling the past few weeks. Everything before Fisk seems overlaid with shades of pastels, cleaner, clearer. Watercolors and old faded photographs. Now it’s all black and white, Humphrey Bogart and _The Maltese Falcon_. Dark and sharp and unmistakable.

“I think it’ll do fine.” Foggy rocks his beer bottle back and forth. “Glad we could help you set up the website for it.”

“And by ‘we,’ you mean me and Karen, please and thank you.” Darcy kicks him in the ankle. “I swear to god, for someone who spends so much time on Tumblr, the basics of website construction are completely beyond you.”

“Yeah, well, fuck you. I still have more followers than you do.”

He does. Everyone loves Foggy always, no matter if it’s digital or physical. Darcy rolls her eyes. “Blogs are the new newspapers, Ben. Ever heard of Laurie Penny? She does kickass work. Uber-feminist, social justice warrior, snarker extraordinaire. Her book is basically made of perfect, and her blog, _Penny Red_ , that’s huge. Does a lot of coverage of social issues and political stuff in the UK.”

“Laurie Penny,” Ben repeats, as if he’s committing it to memory, and then nods. “Well, at least there’s _some_ hope. At least this way I don’t have editors telling me what I can and can’t write about.”

“Because I’m so sure you’re wanting to go back to the subway station story.” Karen’s eyes dance. “How’s the war wound? You keep flinching when you breathe too deep.”

“It’s fine.” Ben waves the concern away. “It’s not as if I’m dead. All of you keep fussing.”

“According to Kate the cut was like…the full length of your hand, Ben, of course we’re fussing.” Foggy tips his head to the side. “And you probably didn’t go to the hospital either, because both of you and Darcy are _fucking insane._ ”

“What happened to Lewis’s hand would have been reported to the police, if she’d gone to the emergency room,” says Ben. “Same with my paper cut. They’re only just starting to pick up all the cops who have been on Fisk’s take, it would have been the same as giving ourselves up to Fisk himself. No, I’m more interested in who did the cast on your hand than anything, Lewis.”

“Ask me no secrets and I will tell you no lies, Mr. Urich,” says Darcy, and leans back in her chair. CC had come in and out as quietly as a ghost, and whatever the woman is running from, Darcy doesn’t want to be the one to blow her cover. “Does Doris like the new place?”

“I could smack Kate Bishop. Six months paid, no questions.” Ben’s mouth gets all tight and grumpy-looking. “They won’t let me take over the payment plan. Don’t dare question her. I don’t need to be managed financially by a college sophomore who’s never had to work a day in her life.”

Darcy, who’s narrowly avoided having Kate discover how much she owes Metro-General, makes a face.

“She’s trying to help.” Karen sips at her tequila, not looking up from the grain of the table. “She’s maybe not going about it the right way, but she _is_ trying to help. And if you talk to her about it without yelling at her, she might actually hear you a little better.”

Ben tips his head back, peering at Karen down the line of his nose. “Doesn’t change the fact that I can’t possibly afford to keep Doris where she is on my own. She’ll have to be moved again eventually, because Kate Bishop is _not_ going to take over the payments for my wife’s care.”

“You could always bring her back to the city,” Foggy says. “I mean, you’re working from home now, right? You’d be there with her, and you wouldn’t have to worry about paying for the nursing home at all. That’s what we did with my dad, after we couldn’t afford to keep him in the hospital anymore. Blogging doesn’t exactly pay the same way journalism does, but at least you’ll be able to make your own hours.”

It’s clear that Ben’s thought of this, from the way he peers at Foggy, but he nods once. Then he changes the subject. “I already have a few offers for freelance work. Apparently even though the _Bulletin_ thought the only thing I was good for anymore was subways and color-coded surveys, breaking the story on Fisk’s mother—” he dips his head to Karen, says nothing else “—seems to have turned me into a person again. So, there’s that.”

“That’s wonderful.” Karen squeezes his elbow.

“I was planning on doing a series of interviews with people who have been particularly affected by Fisk, from the ground up.” Darcy may not know Ben Urich very well, but she can see the start of a monologue as well as anybody. Karen’s just nodding, rapt. “Starting with Mrs. Cardenas, maybe, include you, Lewis—if Lewis’s all right with it—and Kate, since I don’t have to worry about making my editor happy anymore. Even Hoffman if I play my cards right. NYPD’s not willing to let anybody talk to him _yet,_ but I have an in they don’t.”

“Which is?”

“You three,” Ben says, and next to her, Matt looks away to hide that his lips are twitching. “So expect bribery and extensive interrogation.”

“I don’t know if we can actually do that. Unless Hoffman wants to.” Foggy fidgets a little. “Considering all the different cases we could wreck if he says too much we’d have to be _really_ careful about what questions are okay and what aren’t—”

“I have a list,” says Ben, and then they’re off. Darcy gets to her feet, and slips away from the table to talk to Josie. Rosa, on Josie’s shoulder, has one beady eye on Matt, watching, waiting, an actual velociraptor with wings. Darcy reaches out and strokes one finger down Rosa’s wing joint before leaning into the edge of the bar, ignoring the truck drivers two stools down.

“I don’t know how long we’re gonna be here, Josie, sorry. Boys brought shop talk.”

“Do I look like I give a damn?” says Josie, which, from Josie, is basically an _I love you_. Usually she wants people in and out as fast as fucking possible. “Did you come up here for a reason?”

“Vodka’s a good reason, isn’t it?”

A dark-haired woman at the end of the counter snorts, but otherwise no one comments. Josie goes to root around under the counter. To Josie, vodka is _always_ a good reason.

They leave Josie’s at about eleven, packing Ben into a cab. It’s turned and long since left their sight when Karen glances at Foggy and Matt, cocking her eyebrow at Darcy. “Plans?”

“Sleep,” says Foggy, and passes a hand over his face. “Like, all of the sleep. I keep waking up thinking people are trying to kill me. It’s extraordinarily disconcerting.”

“Generally that happens if you leave the TV on _Sharknado_ before going to sleep,” says Darcy, and bats Foggy’s hand away before he can get at her hip. She hears a siren go off somewhere nearby, and her heart skips. _This is your city, Darcy. This is yours. This is a place you can save._ “I’m heading to the office. I said I’d call Claire, and I need to Skype Kate before tomorrow.”

Foggy looks between Darcy and Matt, as if he’s waiting for one of them to twitch. Considering his ex-girlfriend and the woman he has an enormous crush on seem to have decided to be best hacker-bros, it’s not as if he has much ground to stand on when it comes to Darcy’s friendship with Claire Temple. “Not—not doing the Chinatown thing tonight?”

“Not tonight, no.” She’s still tired, still achy. Still can’t defend herself, really. Still wants to rest. “Karen?”

“Bed. Sleep. Sleep is good.” Karen glances up at the sky, and then down at her watch. “We need to go over the paperwork for your meeting with Moustakas tomorrow.”

“If Moustakas’s clerk of court doesn’t kill me for having to push it back.” Considering her name’s been in the papers fairly recently, though, she knows for a fact that Moustakas will understand. Matt lifts his head, and she blinks at him. “What?”

“Incoming,” Matt says, and in the next moment there’s a sound like a rubber band breaking, and a flicker of motion through the air. Spider-Man snaps around the corner without casting a glance their way, and Darcy hears a whoop of glee. Karen’s eyes get about as big as saucers, but Foggy just looks pleased. She’s pretty sure that out of all the masks wandering around the city lately, Spider-Man is Foggy’s favorite.

“You guys should team up,” says Foggy, and Darcy’s the one to punch him in the arm. “What, I’m serious, it would be awesome!”

“I highly doubt he’d be interested. Plus, _Bugle_.” She waggles her fingers at Spider-Man’s retreating back, though. Not like he notices, but she feels like it’s the right thing to do. “Clerk of court, early morning meeting—Matt?”

The corners of his lips twitch. “Work.”

“Yeah.” She darts a look at Foggy (who’s hailing a cab) and Karen (who’s still staring at her phone) before going up on tiptoe and pressing a kiss to his mouth. Light and quick, but it’s the first time she’s really done that in public, and she can feel Matt smiling into it. “Go do good things. And be safe.”

“You guys are gross,” says Foggy. “Stop being gross.”

Darcy flips her middle finger at him, and kisses Matt again just to prove a point.

“Share a cab with me,” Foggy says, once Karen’s vanished and Matt’s tapped his way down the street. “It’ll be cheaper.”

“Why, Foggy Nelson, I never.” She bats her eyelashes at him. “Are you trying to get me _alone_?”

“Don’t be disgusting.” He opens the cab door, and she laughs as she scoots by him, sliding to the opposite side of the cab. The driver’s white, wearing a Hawaiian shirt even though it’s probably only twenty degrees outside. Foggy drops down into the backseat, and tells the guy the address before slamming the door shut. “I wanted to talk to you, I guess.”

“You _guess_.” She kind of wants to pinch his cheek. Darcy looks down at her cast, and then back up at him. “This isn’t about what you and Ben were going over, is it? Because generally work-talk is saved for, you know, work.”

“Nah.” Foggy laughs. “Nah, not that. That’s just Ben being bossy.” Saying Ben Urich is bossy is like saying Hurricane Katrina is a bit of wind, Darcy thinks, but she just bites her lip to hold back a smile. “I just wanted to see if you were doing okay, you know? After everything.”

“Oh.” Darcy mulls that over for a moment. “I’m okay. Tired, mostly. There’s been a lot coming in. Honestly I should be the one asking you if _you’re_ okay.”

“I’m in my natural habitat,” says Foggy. “Kicking ass and taking names.”

“You’re a crazy person.”

“Shut up, it’s true. It’s a little terrifying to know that me and Marci are talking again, but, you know, that’s life. No, I was asking because, like—” He actually looks a little nervous. Darcy quickly steadies herself. “I mean, I know you and Matt are a thing now. And with—everything else, I just—I wanted to see if you were okay.”

She’s not sure if it’s the alcohol or the relief or just the sudden, overwhelming sense of affection and love for her dumb friend-brother-partner that makes her slide across the cab, and knock her head into his shoulder. Foggy jumps a little, but shifts so he can hook an arm around her, nudging his chin against her hair. Darcy closes her eyes, and lets out a breath, ignoring the dirty look that the cabbie’s giving them from the front seat. “It really doesn’t bother you?”

“I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s kind of weird. Subtext has become text, which definitely has a transition period, and if you guys keep kissing near me I think I _might_ actually projectile vomit. I get that you have like—seven years of built-up whatever, but it’s like I’m watching my best friend kissing my sister and that’s _so weird_ —don’t you do that.”

Darcy draws her fingers away from his ribs. “Do what?”

He gives her that _it’s not funny to be an asshole_ expression.

“Fine, I’ll be serious.” She lifts her head to look him in the face. “Tell me the truth, though. You’re okay?”

“ _I’m_ okay. I just want to know if you’re okay.”

She considers that for a long time. Then she closes her eyes, and worms her good arm between his back and the seat, squeezing him a little. “Yeah,” she says. “I mean—yeah. We’re good. _I’m_ good. I’m happy.”

“Even with Chinatown?”

“Yes, even with Chinatown.” Maybe even because of Chinatown. She feels whole for the first time since she was ten years old, but she can’t explain that. Not really. “I’m happy, Foggy. You don’t have to worry about me.”

Foggy blows out a breath. “Okay.” She can hear his heartbeat through his suit jacket. “But if you guys fight, I’m already declaring myself neutral. I am _not_ getting involved in a lover’s quarrel with my two best friends. It’s just not happening. No sides for this guy. I am sideless.”

“So you’re a line,” Darcy says, “a line on a graph that never ends—shit, don’t you do that! That’s a declaration of war!”

“You started it,” says Foggy, but he’s laughing in a way that means he’s all right.

“You better remember that when you lose, Nelson.”

“Psh, shrink your head. It’s getting too big for your itty-bitty body.” He bounces his eyebrows at her, and then his mouth tightens at the edges. “Oh, last thing: You hurt him, I hurt you.”

Darcy blows air out through her nose. “Did you say that to Matt, too?”

“Yeah. But vice versa. You hurt her, I hurt you. You know?”

“Seriously,” Darcy says. “You’re the _best_ person.”

“Daily worship is at five. Just bring bagels.”

She snorts until she chokes.  

It’s probably five in the morning when she hears the window open, and swims back to consciousness. She’s shifted her room around a little, to make room for things she’s putting in boxes and into bags (something Jen has noticed but said nothing about), and so when Matt crouches by her open window, he can reach down and touch her cheek. “Hey. I want to show you something.”

She’s wrong. When she looks at her clock, it’s _four_ in the morning. She’s been asleep for maybe three hours. Still, she blinks, and nods. “Is it a violent something?”

His mouth quirks. “A little. Bring the suit.”

Darcy shoves her glasses onto her face, and yanks the satchel out from under the bed. “Yippee-kay-yay, motherfuckers, it’s violence time.”

“I feel like as an attorney this is not a thing you should be saying.”

“Says the lawyer in the devil horns.” She eyes the cowl, the sharp cut of black-on-red. “Do I get to make fun of the suit yet?”

“Only if I get to make fun of yours,” says Matt, and she knocks him in the ribs with her elbow. The suit’s too thick for him to feel anything more than a tap, but he still laughs at her, and scuffs his hand through her hair.

She’s not exactly sure what she’s expecting, but an old gym isn’t it. She’s been to this place before, once; after Elektra left, and Matt had gone so very dark (because he had, for a long and terrible time that she always hates to remember), she and Foggy had tracked Matt down to Fogwell’s Gym. It had been Foggy’s idea— _what if he’s hurting himself, what if something’s happening, I don’t—we can’t lose him, Darcy—_ and she’d felt weird about it, but she’d assumed it had something to do with this being his dad’s gym. Now, though, she knows a little better. Matt scuffs aside a brick a few dozen yards down from the back door, and picks up a key. “I pay Bernie to leave this for me,” he says, and unlocks the door, stowing it on top of the frame. “For when I come in after everyone’s gone.”

“Do you do that a lot?” He cants his head at her, and she clarifies. “Come here, not pay Bernie. Should I be jealous that you pay Bernie?”

“Such a comedian.”

“I’m here all year, _Daredevil_.”

He pulls off the cowl once they’re inside. “I don’t have a lot of time to spend at Fogwell’s anymore. I come here when I need someplace to think. Used to as a kid, right after my dad died. With Stick, I’d practice in the orphanage basement, on rooftops, but here…I don’t know. It was easier.” Matt lifts one shoulder. “If Stick ever knew about this place, he never said anything about it. And they remember my dad here, so.”

They don’t hit the lights—they don’t want anybody to call the cops—but there are just enough skylights that the streetlamps and full moon can brighten things up a little. In the center there’s a boxing ring, elevated, all ropes and fringe, a few folding chairs set up by the edge of it as if someone was watching. There’s no equipment that’s less than ten years old, it seems like, even when it comes to the more modern things like treadmills and cycles; Matt ignores those, slipping through the machines without comment, and stops by a bag. The whole place smells like sweat, dust, and she sneezes once (she can’t help it, okay) before realizing there’s another scent beneath it. Coppery, almost. She wonders how many people have bled in here.

Her eyes drift over Matt’s shoulder and catch on an old poster. _Creel vs. Murdock._ “So, what are we doing here? Before dawn. In battle suits.”

“There’s not a lot you can do until your arm heals, but you’re right. You need to at least know how to put someone down.” He considers. “How to fall, how to use your legs. How to get your breath back if someone punches you in the gut. How to disarm someone. All of it. I thought we could start.”

She has a meeting in five hours that she’s probably going to go to without the barrier of coffee because of this expedition, but all at once she’s so tremendously hyperaware of the world, so absolutely, overwhelmingly excited, that she can’t stand still. Darcy circles the nearest punching bag, suspended on a chain from the ceiling, and touches her fingers to it twice before looking back at Matt. _Yes_. She gets to hit something. She gets to _hit_ something. _Yes._ “So I’m changing into my suit because—?”

“Weight’s different. Not by much, but it’s enough. Besides, if you do end up having to move without it, you’ll be that much faster.” He pushes the bag a little. “There are bandages in the duffel bag on the bench. When you’re ready, I can wrap your hand.”

She changes alone. It’s the first time she’s worn the suit since chasing Vanessa, and as she zips it up the side, fumbling with one hand, she realizes that she’s been wanting the weight of it. Her regular clothes feel too light. It’s a ghostly second skin, haunting her even when she’s miles away. And that should make her nervous, but instead there’s a delightful prickling down the skin of her spine, a stuttering in her breathing. Because yeah. She really, really likes this suit.

They work until eight am, and escape before Bernie opens the gym. Her arm feels like a noodle, during the meeting with Moustakas, and her legs are about ten times worse, but it’s more than worth it.

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.

 **Daily Bulletin (@dailybulletinnyc):** A week after Fisk’s arrest, the city asks: where have the heroes gone? #daredevil #lilith #hawkgal dbl.co/…

 **RooKate (@archersdoitbetter):** I thought we already clarified that #hawkeye works just as well. @dailybulletinnyc

 **Hero Watch (@maskwatchnyc)** We’re starting to wonder if #lilith’s a one-off, like #jewel. #deepquestions

 **Rising Santino (@saintvasquez)** : @maskwatchnyc Maybe she’s shy? Or, you know, doing other stuff. Like ignoring you. For obvious reasons.

 **LightBringer (@manymanymiles)** : @stgrrogers @witchlet @batnat @therealtonystark Where did #hawkeye go? Still questions unanswered. nyt.co/…

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In all honesty, she should have expected it sooner. But really? Darcy’s been tired. People have actually been coming to the firm, thanks to Kate and Elena spreading the word. Also, thanks to Santino, of all people—he’s been quietly escorting in one homeless person in a day for the past three days, each of them kids around the age of eighteen or nineteen, each of them queer runaways, and each of them want to level suits against shelters. She’s certain that the only reason they ever would have come to them is because of Santino and Santino vouching for her, Santino sitting quietly beside them with his hands in his pockets and watching her with dark, level, smiling eyes. Where he finds these kids, she doesn’t know, but it breaks her heart to see it, breaks her heart that they know him so well. (And it makes her wonder, again, what drives Santino to spend so much time with Claire. Whether or not Claire’s the only thing that’s kept him from ending up just like these kids. Wonders what the hell his mother thinks she’s doing, or if she’s thinking at all.)

So it’s really not her fault that when she finally closes the door behind the newest client (a girl from Elena’s building, a nineteen year old Korean immigrant who wants to file a suit against her nail salon, where the owner works her eighteen hours a day and pays her next to nothing) Darcy has a pounding headache and a slow, viscous, vicious hatred for all the sociopathic, bureaucratic, queerphobic, misogynistic douchebags in the entire city.

She wonders if the owner of the nail salon—Christina Markoza, forty-two, born in Jersey City, owner of the Fresh Nails Salon chain all through Midtown—would do well with a visit from Lilith. Then she squashes the notion down. _Work is work,_ she tells herself. _Legal work is legal work. Mask work is mask work. Don’t let them mix._

“People are terrible,” she tells Matt, who’s been sitting with headphones in his ears, working quietly on his braille reader. He hears her, of course. He tugs one of the earbuds out. “Why are people terrible?”

He leans back in his chair, his eyebrows going up. His glasses are casting reddish shadows over his cheekbones, almost like bruises. “Do you want the long answer or the short one?”

“You’re hilarious,” she says. She’s been trying fairly hard not to kiss him in the office, because yeah, professionalism, but when she scoots around to his side of the desk, Matt touches his hand to the small of her back. Darcy rests her good palm against his far shoulder, so she’s curled around him as best she can while he’s sitting and she’s standing. There’s an 8tracks playlist up on his computer screen, one that Foggy made ages ago. (Foggy makes playlists for people on their birthdays. And for holidays. And basically for everything, because aside from old bookstore merch, Foggy just doesn’t know what to give people for presents. The music is always awesome, though, so it’s a million times better than a book she’s never going to read or a shirt she’s never going to wear or whatever.) “Were you listening to music all through that?”

“No.” Sure enough, it’s paused. “You didn’t answer. You want the long answer, or the short one?”

“I will hurt you.” She tugs her fingers through his hair, instead. “Was she lying?”

“About the eighteen hour days? No. About not having a second job?” He shrugs. “I’ve been hearing things about an influx of Asian immigrants in local sex trafficking circles. It’s possible that one of the salons is a front. No way to know unless we check.”

“Then we can check.” Outside, a door slams. Foggy’s back from his cinnamon roll run. (“Hey, I get cravings, so sue me—but don’t, because no, it would not be funny, Lewis, don’t even try.”) From the sound of it, he’s brought Kate back with him. They’re bickering over something or other. Darcy leans into Matt’s shoulder, hiding her face against his hair. “Shit. Do I need to go out there and referee?”

Matt touches the back of her wrist. “On the hurricane scale, it’s maybe a one.” There’s a particularly loud squawk from Kate, and he makes a face. “Or a three. She brought papers.”

“Okay.” Her head hurts. “I can swear out there now, right, there’s—there’s no clients or anything?”

“No, no clients.”

“Good,” she says, and she slams the door to their office open. “Shut the _fuck_ up!”

Foggy stops dead, one hand halfway raised to point at Kate. Kate freezes, too, but only for a second. She hasn’t known Darcy as long as Foggy has, and she doesn’t know when to count her blessings. Then again, Kate _has_ seen Darcy tase people. Foggy has not. “I wouldn’t have to be yelling if he’d just _listen_ ,” she snaps, and Foggy makes a furious little sound, caught tight between his teeth. Behind her desk, Karen rubs at her temple with two fingers, and then opens a file to start highlighting things. She’s staring so hard at the page that Darcy’s surprised her papers don’t catch on fire.

“Oh my god, what the _hell_ , you guys. What even—”

“She wants to intern here,” Foggy says, too fast. She’s pretty sure he’s trying to keep Kate from interrupting. “Which we can’t _do_ right now since we’re barely making enough to support ourselves, let alone start an internship program, and besides, you’re taking _art history_ , Bishop, in what world—”

“Do you have another reason worked out for why I’ll be hanging around here? It works. Seriously. Just—I was thinking about changing my major anyway, art history is what my dad wanted me to take, and besides, it’s not like interns get paid—”

“You’re missing the point, which is _we don’t have work for you_. We’re just now getting work for ourselves, like—and who the hell says you’ll be hanging around here all the time? You have school and—and a _life_. This isn’t a place where you _hang around_.”

“Kate,” says Darcy, when Kate opens her mouth. Kate grinds her teeth, clenching her fists, but she falls silent, and starts to pace, _clack-clack-clack_ against the floor. “Foggy has a point.”  

“What I want to know,” Karen says in her quiet-yet-loud voice, not looking up from her papers, “is why the hell it turned into a shouting match. It’s not as though you’re not adults.” She looks up at both of them through her eyelashes. “Unless either of you want to tell me something.”

Holy shit. Karen gets _mean_ when she’s mad. Foggy’s ears turn red, and he stares hard at the wall. Kate, though—Kate has no survival instincts. “I just don’t get why it’s such a problem. I’ve already talked to my advisor and she told me that I’ll get college credit for it, so it’s not as though it’s an issue on my end, and I don’t—just have me photocopy shit for hours at a time if it makes you feel better, but it’s not like I’m going _away_ anytime soon—”

“Guys,” Matt says, coming to the door, but no one seems to notice.

“Like I said.” Foggy pinches the bridge of his nose. “Until we get at least two years under our belts, there is absolutely _no_ way your advisor—or any advisor! In any department!—is going to go for this. It looks so fishy, I can’t—it’s not going to work. If you were to go for another firm, maybe, or—or even the DA’s office, that’d be good, but we’re just starting out here. We haven’t even been open more than a month, getting an _intern_ —”

“ _Guys_ ,” Matt says again, and there’s an edge to his voice that’s all Daredevil. Foggy doesn’t hear it—he doesn’t know Daredevil the way he knows Matt, not yet—and Kate’s just not paying attention. Karen does, though. Her head snaps up, her eyes get wide, and she looks at Darcy, her lips parting. _What do we do?_ She can hear footsteps in the hallway.

Darcy seizes Foggy’s baseball from the top of the photocopier, and throws it at Kate’s head.

Kate sees it, of course. Kate sees it, and catches it easily, barely even looking at it, but she gives Darcy such a dirty look for it that Darcy wants to run and hide, snarl and fight and whack Kate Bishop up the side of the head, all at once. Foggy shuts up and stares at them all with big, confused eyes. And in the same instant, the door opens. There’s a man standing outside, kind of scruffy around the edge; he looks as though he’s just rolled out of someone else's bed, stained purple shirt and beat-up skinny jeans that are ragged around the hem, a big bruise on the side of his throat that disappears down under his torn collar. There’s a one-eyed golden retriever on a leather leash at his side. Scruffy McHipster scuffs a hand over his unshaven jaw, and his eyes flick from one of them to the next before finally landing on the baseball that’s clenched hard in Kate’s hand. One eyebrow goes up. “Sorry,” he says. “Am I interrupting something? Sounded kinda loud, from down the hall.”

Karen sets her papers aside, uncrosses her legs, and emerges from behind her desk, hooking her hair behind her ears. “No, of course not. Is there something I can help you with?”

Scruffy McHipster focuses on Karen, just for a second. Then he looks at Kate again, and she ignores him, stalking over to the photocopier to replace Foggy’s baseball before taking a spot next to Darcy, arms crossed tight over her chest. Scruffy McHipster’s eyes flick over Matt, and then return to Kate and Darcy, like he’s seen something unexpected. “This is, uh—this is Nelson, Murdock and Lewis?”

Karen glances at Darcy and Kate, and then back to Scruffy.

“I’m Lewis,” Darcy says, and sticks out her hand. He has odd calluses on his palms. “Darcy, to be precise. Can I help you with something? Our office hours are almost done for the day, but we can fit you in if you’re willing to start now.”

“Actually, I’m here to pick up her,” he says, and he points at Kate with one long finger.

Everything happens very fast. Without even blinking, Foggy shifts so he’s standing between Karen and the crazy hipster at the door. Karen pulls open the top drawer on the right hand side of her desk, where Darcy knows she keeps her mace when it’s not in her purse. Kate’s hand drops to her hip, where she has a throwing knife hidden under the waistband of her skinny jeans. Matt tightens his fingers around his guiding cane, his face suddenly, starkly blank. And Darcy locks her hands behind her back, where the gun she’d taken from Turk Barrett is pressed into the small of her spine.

“You know him, Kate?” says Darcy. She doesn’t want to use the gun, especially because this guy hasn’t actually _done_ anything yet, but it’s not as if she can carry her taser everywhere. And besides, she’s trying to look the least like Lilith as she possibly can, out of uniform. Gun? Believable. Taser? Makes people think too much about boobtacular brunettes with anger issues.

“Not in the slightest.” Kate’s eyes narrow.

“All righty, then.” She tips her head, steps just a little to the side so that if Matt needs to move, he can do it without knocking her over. “Then you’re gonna have to explain yourself, soldier. Our intern’s a bit precious to us. We’d hate to lose her.”

“She’s not our intern,” Foggy says, pained.

“Hey,” says Kate. “No take-backs.”

“Nobody’s going to be losing anybody,” says Scruffy McHipster. He gives Matt another curious glance, but other than that he seems completely unbothered by the fact that they all just basically drew weapons on him and threatened him with immediate, painful death. “We just need to have a talk about her Twitter army hijacking my name. I’m pretty sure Stark had it copyrighted to me, so it’s kind of illegal unless we work out some kind of share deal.” He considers. “Maybe you can have it Tuesday Thursday Saturday and I can have it the rest of the week? Then when there’s a HYDRA outpost that goes to shit or Doc Doom decides to set his robots on a city in the Czech Republic at ass o’clock on a Thursday night, I can just sleep through it.”

None of them can find anything to say.

“Just a thought,” says Clint Barton.

The dog whines.

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.

 **Victor ManCHA (@lamanchaman)** : Seriously though it’s like playing Carmen Sandiego but with superheroes. @maskwatchnyc #whereintheworldistheangelofmercy

 **KHAAAAAAAAN (@kamala_k)** : @lamanchaman What kind of Carmen Sandiego did you play because that was small beans compared to this #whereintheworldistheangelofmercy

 **MJ, Not Mary Jane (@keepyourpotawayfromme):** @lamanchaman I fail to see how #lilith is actually merciful, aside from not, you know, shooting people in the face.

 **Victor ManCHA (@lamanchaman):** @keepyourpotawayfromme No, an angel of mercy is a type of serial killer, check it out: wiki.co/…

 **Hero Finder (@maskwatchnyc)** : @theurichreport Any comment? tmblr.co/ZpRtXm1oY14_2 #samsonanddelilahofhell #whereintheworldistheangelofmercy

 **Victor ManCHA (@lamanchaman)** : @maskwatchnyc If you made my tag trend I am going to scream.

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.

“Seriously, the pair of you just need—you just need to stop.” Claire looks over Darcy’s hand again, and then sighs. “It’s getting awkward trying to smuggle first aid stuff out of the hospital. Which I _hate_ doing, but there’s only so much I can buy from the local Walgreens before people start getting twitchy. What did you even do this time?”

“I slipped.” The stitches are much better than anything Darcy could have done, neat and economical. “Which I’m good at anyway, but, you know, it’s—it’s harder to keep your balance in heels. Especially when you’re trying to learn capoeira at the same time.”

Claire gives her a sharp look. “I haven’t heard of Lilith getting involved in anything the past few days. Unless you’re being very sneaky about it.”

“I’m not.” Claire makes another stitch, and Darcy watches it, biting down hard on the inside of her cheek. There’s no anesthetic this time, simply because she doesn’t want to use up Claire’s precious stores on something so tiny as her dumb hand. At least she’s only broken the stitches on one hand. “I mean, I haven’t, lately. Not since Fisk.”

“Because that was so long ago.” She pulls the needle tight, her gloved hand steady and still against Darcy’s casted wrist. She’s wearing cuffs in her ears that Darcy doesn’t remember being there before. “You taking a break? Seems a bit early for that, already.”

“I have a taser and a gun, but apparently it’s dangerous for me to wander around in the dark without knowing how to break someone’s neck with my feet.” Because that’s a thing Matt’s been showing her how to do. It’s not fun, particularly, but capoeira— _that’s_ fun. “I’m okay, seriously. I’m working on it.”

Claire hums in a way that sounds like _I don’t think I believe you_. “You sure?”

“Sure about working on it?”

“Don’t be dense.” She peers down into Darcy’s hand again. “You said to me you weren’t—planning on this. So, you know. You sure you’re okay?”

That’s the question, isn’t it. “I didn’t think I could manage it, before,” Darcy says slowly. “But—but the way I think about things, I have to see things, do things, in order to fully understand them. So now that I’ve done it, it’s like—”

Like she can’t stop. Like she _won’t_ stop. And it scares her and thrills her and overloads her, all at once, like jabbing a knife into an electrical socket. Like being constantly filled with lightning.

 _But you’re not special,_ a voice whispers in the back of her head. _You’re not anybody. You’re just Darcy._

Shut up, little voice.

“So…” She draws it out, skeptical. _Sooooo_. “You tried it and you liked it?”

“Not exactly.” Darcy lifts one shoulder in half a shrug. “First of all, people I love nearly died. And—did I tell you that when Fisk tried to kill me, him and me had a long talk about justice? It was pants-shittingly terrifying, at the time. But, you know, I meant what I said to him. I love the law. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since elementary school, ever since my babushka—my grandmother—she told me my grandfather was a lawyer, and that he saved people. And I’ve wanted to be one since then, but I’m older now. And there are gaps, flaws we can’t fix, that mean good people get hurt. The law can’t fix everything, can’t _stop_ everything, but maybe—maybe we can. I don’t know.”

“Bit dangerous, to think like that.”

“I know. Which is why I’m not alone. If I was, it’d—it’d get really bad really fast, but maybe with you here, and everyone else, they can keep me straight.”

They sit in silence for a while.

“Santino told me you guys have been busy, at the firm.”

“Is that what he calls it? Because he keeps bringing more people in. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of them can’t pay, so Foggy’s getting antsy.” She sighs through her nose. “How’s the hospital?”

“Decent. Much better now that there’s not some asshole blowing up the city every other night.” Claire knots the last stitch, studies her work, and then nods once. “How are your fingers doing?”

“Improving, slowly. CC said that none of my tendons were severed, which is a fucking miracle.” It also makes her wonder what Hironobu Orihara was planning on _doing_ to said tendons. She shakes that image off as fast as it comes, because no, she’s _not_ going to have a meltdown right now. “It’s mostly just irritating at this point. Like my rib is. Was. Is? It still hurts sometimes.”

“Yeah, well, these are gonna take longer than your rib to get better, simply because your rib was a fracture, not—not a full break.” Claire rewraps Darcy’s hand, her hair falling forward over her face. “At least you haven’t managed to get yourself stabbed in the throat or something. I don’t think I could handle that.” She peeks up at Darcy through her eyelashes. “Well, not for another six months. A girl needs her beauty sleep.”

“Such a funny lady. I think I might die from a humor overdose.”

“You think I’m joking, but I’m really not.” Claire leans back in her chair, and snaps her gloves off, throwing them into the CVS bag she has open on the coffee table. There’s old gauze in there too, clipped stitches. Darcy nearly clenches her hand into a fist before she remembers— _right. Splints._ “You realize I never know whether or not you’re going to drop in through my apartment window bloody and possibly dying. It’s like I’m constantly walking on knives.”

“This is why I will someday buy you all of the booze,” Darcy says, and Claire snorts. “Just, like, all of it. Are you coming to that thing that Elena’s doing? She said she was going to invite you, since you helped her so much at the hospital.”

“I don’t think it’s the best idea, somehow.” Claire ties off the CVS bag, and sets it on the floor, drawing her knees up against her chest. “Probably better that you guys and me stay out of sight of each other during the daylight hours. Though, you know, it’s a little easier with you, since we have a built-in story, thanks to the bombings. But the firm—” she shakes her head. “Besides, it’d be unprofessional. I haven’t gone to a patient’s after-party before now, and I don’t plan on doing it in the future. It blurs too many lines, makes it difficult to remember what I actually am.”

“Triage nurse and stone-cold badass?”

“Well, I thought that was obvious.” She lets out a little breath through her nose. “No, I get the feeling that it’s better if I stay on the sidelines, just for now. I told you, I’m not—I fix things. Let me be the fixer. But not the Fixer, you know, because I—I remember he was like a mob dude from when I was a kid. So I’m a fixer, not _the_ Fixer.”

“I don’t know, I didn’t grow up here.” But the city’s in her blood, now, the same way Atlanta is. Two sides, one coin. “Are you doing okay?”

“Nothing that a few million years of therapy won’t fix.” Claire sighs again. “I keep telling you, you worry too much. I’m all right. I’ll get by. You’re the one that’s, you know, actively pursuing a career in back-alley brawls.”

“I’ve been reliably informed that they’re not _all_ back-alley brawls. Sometimes they’re side-alley brawls. Or even side- _street_ brawls. We vary.” Darcy rests her hands in her lap. “I know how you feel about this stuff. So, you know, if you—if you don’t want me to talk about it, it can be a verboten subject.”

“It’s not that I think it’s a _bad_ thing,” says Claire. “It’s like—you know, sometimes I get the people that Daredevil _talks_ to—” she crooks her fingers into air quotes “—in at Metro-General. And there’s a part of me that knows he enjoys it, because that level of destruction, it can’t be explained otherwise. And I remember what you did the night of the bombings. It’s just hard to reconcile the fact that the same person who started a juice militia for my ER patients is also dressing up like Catwoman and learning how to break a man’s neck with her feet.”

“I mean, my hand is kind of broken into little pebbly bits right now. There’s not a lot I can do at the moment.” She shakes her head before Claire can speak. “One of those things doesn’t negate the other, Claire. It’s not as if I’m making a conscious decision to go between Darcy and Lilith and back again. There’s a part of me, a really big part, that’s _always_ Lilith. I heard a story from a girl Santino brought in yesterday, about—about a woman who works in that homeless shelter nearby, raping her in one of the back bathrooms, and I thought, _I want to break that woman’s spine._ I sat there listening to her and I imagined what it would feel like. And then I made the girl—her name’s Amber—I made Amber coffee, made sure she ate something before she left, because I can be both. I _am_ both. I’ve been so angry for so long that I can’t remember what it was like before. I’m not going to lie, I’m a little scared of what I can do, of what I _want_ to do, but that doesn’t—that doesn’t mean I stop wanting to do it.”

Claire searches her face. Then she stands, closing up her medical kit. “You and Matt,” she says. “It’s like one of those weird cosmic jokes. Like the universe shuffles things around to make things _just_ so. Bonnie finding Clyde, or—or Thelma and Louise.”

“Excuse you. I have stolen two things in my life, and both were iPods that had to be liberated from eternal, purgatorious limbo.”

“You know what I mean.” She shoves the kit under the couch, shaking her head. “I don’t know. I just sometimes wonder what life would have been like if you two _hadn’t_ met.”

Darcy bats her eyelashes. “A hell of a lot less charming.”

“You think you’re funny, Lewis.” There’s a soft knock at the door. Claire peeps through the hole, and then lets Santino in. He gives Darcy a little salute before heading down the hall, off to whatever nest he’s built lately. “Get outta here. I need to sleep before my morning shift.”

“Cheers for the fix-up. Remind me not to use my left hand ever again.” She busses Claire’s cheek, and slips back into her low heels. She’s halfway through the door when she stops, and turns around again. Claire cocks her head in a silent question. “Seriously, Claire. Thank you. For all of it. Not just this, but—but all of it. For being there, even though it’s not—thank you.”

Claire looks at her for a time, so inscrutable as to be an Easter Island statue. Then she licks her lips. “So,” she says. “Matt Murdock _and_ Daredevil, huh?”

For a second, Darcy has no clue what she’s talking about. Then memory clicks. _You need to seriously consider, if you do care about him that much, whether you can survive being with both Matt Murdock and the devil._ Claire cocks her head, waiting, and Darcy can’t help it. She grins. “So,” Darcy replies. “Darcy Lewis _and_ Lilith, yeah?”

Claire laughs. Not a snort or a huff or a smirk, but an actual laugh. “You two are the weirdest couple I know, hands down,” she says, and it’s then that Darcy knows they’re okay. Claire steps forward, and kisses Darcy’s forehead. It’s almost a blessing. “Seriously, go away,” she says, but she’s trying not to smile. “I have to make sure Santino doesn’t get hyped up on Red Bull and stay up all night again.”

“I heard that,” Santino says from down the hall. Darcy hooks her good arm around Claire’s neck, presses her cheek to Claire’s, just for a moment. Then she slips away down the hall. She’s in a cab back to Jen’s apartment when her new phone (cheap, but it works) buzzes.

_Next day off is Sunday. I’m feeling vodka._

_Vodka is always good_ , Darcy replies, and rests her forehead on the window of the cab.

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 **Hero Finder (@maskwatchnyc)** : #daredevil sighting @ 51st and 10th. Photo credit to @archersdoitbetter #samsonanddelilahofhell #whereintheworldistheangelofmercy

 **D Is For Darcy (@darcethefarce)** : @archersdoitbetter when did you turn into a paparazza

 **RooKate (@archersdoitbetter):** #daredevil makes it too easy I swear the horns stick out a mile away @darcethefarce

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Elena hosts a party at her apartment the day the construction workers clear out of the tenement. Considering the amount of damage Tully had managed to create— _like a fucking hurricane on his goddamn island; I hope his house falls down—_ it’s almost frightening how quickly the people Kate’s hired get it all done. Then again, money talks, especially in a city like New York. The flat still smells of paint and plaster, underneath the sear of freshly flipped tortillas and the bite of serrano peppers.

Darcy props herself up on the back of Elena’s couch, ignoring the ache in her legs. Aches happen, she tells herself, when a _fucking sadist_ has you kicking sandbags for hours at a time, because you can’t actually use both your hands well enough to practice punching very often. “You don’t want to develop a crutch,” Matt had said, but considering how terrible her thighs feel (and her core, because holy shit, some of those kicks need more core strength than she ever anticipated) she’d be more than willing to take a crutch at this point. And she’s not talking metaphors.

“You’re twitching.” Kate peeps at her over the rim of her glass. Elena, unlike Claire, refused to give in to Kate’s demands for alcoholic goodness, so she’s stuck with apple juice and is less unhappy about it than Darcy expected. “You look like you have ants crawling up your asshole.”

“Such a classy debutante,” says Darcy, and pinches Kate’s cheek. Kate smacks her hand away. “My legs hurt. And no, this is not a euphemism for _Darcy had awesome sex_. The muscles in my legs might actually fall off onto the carpet and I will walk around as half a skeleton for the rest of my life.”

“That,” says Karen from the sofa, “is actually physically impossible.”

“You mean all those old Edward Gorey cartoons lied to me?” Darcy widens her eyes. “God _dammit_ , I thought I could be a skeleton ghost forever.”

“You’re such a shit.” Karen laughs, though. She passes her glass up to Darcy, and then kicks off her shoes and swings her legs up onto the couch. There’s a hole in the toe of her pantyhose. “That’s what happens when you go running with me in the morning and start taking capoeira lessons at the same time.”

“Is it too late for me to say I regret every decision I’ve made in my life?” She gives Karen her glass of wine back. “But seriously, capoeira’s fun.” And so’s whatever else Matt’s teaching her, most of which are things he won’t quite name. She’s pretty sure that _he_ doesn’t even know what they’re called, just that they’re things Stick taught him. “You should try it. Gives you hella muscles.”

“I’m okay with just running, thanks.”

Kate looks at both of them. “Seriously, though, I thought you guys were together. Not—not those two,” she adds, and then she points at Darcy and then at Matt in tandem. Matt’s standing slightly outside of the circle of Jen, Elena, and Foggy, listening quietly, correcting their fumbling Spanish as Elena tries to hide a smile. “But you two.”

Karen turns a bit pink about the ears. “Well, you know.”

“No, I don’t know. What’s _you know_ mean?”

“ _You know_ means polyamory, you dink,” says Darcy, and Karen turns so bright a red that Kate actually chokes on her juice. Then she scowls.

“Pretty sure that Catholic boy isn’t going to be all that into polyamory.”

“We contain multitudes.”

“You are so full of shit, Lewis.”

“I resemble that remark.”

“It’s not polyamorous,” says Karen. Her voice is a little husky, though. “Don’t tease her about something like that, Darcy.”

“You’re breaking my heart here, Page.”

Kate makes an impatient noise. “Why are all of you guys _so fucking weird_?”

“Oh, go away, lady.” Darcy shoos at Kate with both hands. “Go nag Matt about all those not-so-secret paparazza photos you’ve been shooting of him, _Hawkeye_. Or text your new archery boyfriend, I don’t even know.”

“You realize Clint’s like—older than you guys, right? So that would be enormously sketchy. So sketchy I can’t even. Much sketch, very awkward. Intergenerational amaze.”

“Go _away_ , you walking meme,” Darcy says again, and Kate flounces off, smirking. Darcy slides down onto the couch next to Karen, who’s still huffing a little as if she’s embarrassed. Still, when Darcy catches her eye, she snorts.

“So much for teasing her.”

“They grow up so fast,” Darcy says, sniffling. Karen snorts again, and when Darcy tips to the side, she shuffles around so Darcy can lean on her, rolling her eyes a little.

“Jesus, you’re like a needy cat.”

“That’s better than _pissy_ cat, which is a thing that Foggy has called me. Besides, I see no point in not sharing my affection with all who deserve it. Which you do. So there’s that.” She looks up at Karen. “You’re doing okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

“Karen.”

Karen closes her eyes, just for a moment. There are still pink spots high on her cheekbones. “I don’t really want to talk about it. Not here. Or, you know. Ever. Okay? I’m just—I don’t want to talk about it.”

There’s a handwoven blanket hanging from Elena’s wall, behind the TV. Darcy picks out the pattern, tracing the lines of black through the green and orange. Then she nods once, and Karen relaxes, millimeter by millimeter. She’s not sure how to say, again, what’s already been said—that Karen’s worth it, that she’s a good person, that Darcy’s not sure what’s going to happen if Karen’s guilt destroys her, that Darcy wants so desperately to make it better even though she knows that she never, ever can—so she closes her eyes and presses her cheek into Karen’s shoulder, instead. Karen fidgets with the fraying hem of her loose grey sweater before turning her hand palm-up on her knee, a silent question. Darcy takes it, and they sit in silence for a while, letting the world wash around them.

She only pulls away when she hears Foggy’s shoes scuffing the carpet behind the couch. Even half-asleep, she knows that step. That’s the _I am going to enlist you in something_ step. “What, Foggy?”

“Jesus, I can’t sneak up on any of you anymore.” Foggy sighs. “Come translate for me, I think—I think we’re at cross-purposes again, and Matt’s being a shit.”

“ _Te lo diré de nuevo, eso es lo que obtienes por cursar Punjabi,_ ” Darcy says, and Karen chokes on her wine. Foggy makes a face at her, but when she pads into the kitchen, he tugs her into a one-armed hug that makes her smile. Elena’s eyes crinkle fondly at the pair of them. Jen’s smiling a little behind her glasses. “ _Qué te están diciendo estos idiotas acerca de su flota de autodeslizadores_ _?_ ”

“ _Oh, no seas mala,_ ” says Elena. “ _Los dos lo están intentando tanto._ ”

 _“Es divertido molestarlo, eso es todo."_  Darcy considers, for a moment, and then steps away from Foggy to hug Elena again. “ _La estas pasando bien?_ ”

“ _Estoy en casa,_ ” Elena says, simply. “ _Estoy mucho mejor con tan solo estar en casa._ ”

“ _Kate no te está molestando mucho?_ ”

“ _Kate solo necesita una mano firme._ ” Darcy’s more of the opinion that Kate needs a partner-in-crime and way more therapy than she’s admitting, but Elena is Elena. “ _Como todos ustedes, de alguna manera. Ella es una buena chica. Ha sido muy buena, haciendo todo esto.”_

“ _Kate se siente como si debiera probar algo. No sé lo que es, exactamente, pero creo— creo que está ayudando. Así que de alguna manera, es bueno para ella también._ ” She pulls back. “ _Estás segura de que estás bien?_ ”

“Darling girl.” Elena kisses Darcy’s left cheek, and then the right. “ _No tienes que preocuparte por mí. Estoy perfectamente bien. Y parece que todo esta bien contigo también. La pelea ha acabado?_ ”

“ _La pelea esta resuelta,_ ” Darcy corrects. Her ears feel a bit pink. “ _Todos están mejor. Karen esta bien, Foggy esta bien. Yo estoy bien. Mejorando._ ”

“ _Ya no esta peleando con el Señor Murdock por lo que veo._ ”

 _“No empieces,_ ” says Darcy. “ _I’m Ya estoy recibiendo 'te-lo-dije's de todos, no los necesito de ti._ ”

Elena gives her a singularly wicked smile, and drops her a wink.

“ _Eres terrible_.” Darcy looks back at Foggy. Jen’s eyes are darting from her to Elena and back again, as if she’s trying desperately to keep up. “Foggy, what did you want to ask her about?”

Foggy shakes his head once or twice. “Jesus, you guys talk fast. I’ve been looking into online classes and stuff but I feel like an idiot. I caught like—one word out of that. Which was hovercraft.”

“I’ve been practicing with Karen. Maybe you and Jen could start studying together? She’s trying to teach herself Spanish, too.” Darcy cocks her head at him. “Anyway, what did you want to ask her?  _Te ofrezco mis servicios de traducción, oh hermano querido._ ”

They’re about three quarters of the way into a discussion about Elena’s son (her deadbeat boy who didn’t even come home from Portugal when his mother was being _fucking evicted_ ; she has words to say to Raoul Cardenas) when Matt touches a hand to the small of her back, and she has to excuse herself. Karen and Kate have their heads together about something or other with Jen, who’s sneaked out of the sudden Spanish cacophony. Kate winks at her a little when they pass the couch, dipping down low to whisper something into Karen’s ear. Karen actually _whacks_ her before hiding her face in her hands, and Kate looks so fucking gleeful that Darcy almost smiles. Still. She’s going to have a word with Kate about teasing Karen too much. Though to be honest, Karen can take care of herself.

They stop just at the top of the hallway down to Elena’s bedroom and bath combination, and Matt presses a phone into her hand. “You have a call.”

“ _I_ have a call?” She looks at the phone. It’s not a number she recognizes. “Who do I have a call from? All the people who call me are in this room.”

“Just take the call.” He tugs on the edge of her sleeve. “It should only take a minute.”

He has the same look on his face as he did back in undergrad, when Foggy had organized a surprise birthday party and enlisted Matt to keep the secret. It’s better than a Daredevil look, or even a lawyer look, but it still makes her nervous. Darcy looks down at the phone again, and then frowns at him before padding down Elena’s hallway, locking herself up in the bathroom. It’s far quieter, in here. The walls aren’t paper thin. “Hello?”

“I wondered if the call had dropped,” says a familiar voice, and before she even fully processes, Darcy starts to smile. “I don’t know if he told you who it was, but—”

“C’mon, Father P. Not like it’s hard to tell.” She leans against the tile wall. “I didn’t know you were making phone calls for your favorite parishioners now.”

Father P coughs. “Well, it’s—it’s more and less than that. It’s not quite a social call.”

“But you _did_ get the character sheet I emailed?”

He coughs again. She thinks he might be smiling. “Well, yes. But it’s not about that, either. I have someone here who expressed an interest in talking to you. Two of them, actually. They’ve been nattering at me on and off for the past week or so, and I remembered that we have a mutual acquaintance. So I thought I’d call on their behalf.”

Her heart’s pounding. _No. Are you shitting me? Holy crap._ “They’re there, aren’t they? Tandy and Ty.”

“Mr. Johnson here has told me a very interesting story about a woman called Lilith. Said she told him to bring himself and his friend here—” there’s a bit of high babbling from the other end of the line; Darcy can’t quite make out the words “—to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, because, and I quote, _Father Lantom likes people who ask deep questions._ ”

“It’s not like that’s a secret, Father P.”

“Hmm.” She thinks a priest should be more concerned about her descent into vigilantism. Father P just sounds amused. “Anyway, I called in a favor. Miss Bowen here has a question for you, and she’s been quite desperate to get a hold of you to ask it. I’ve informed them both that from this point on, they’re going to have to find their own ways to contact you. After all, it’s not as if our mutual friend has the time to be fielding phone calls.”

“I’m surprised he even took thisone, to be honest. Speaking of—one second.” She covers the receiver with one hand, looks towards the door. “Matt, I’m gonna kill you. Some _warning_ would have been nice.”

There’s no response, but she thinks she hears Foggy say something like, “Whoa, dude, don’t choke,” so she knows he’s heard her. Darcy shakes her hair back over her shoulders, sets the phone to her ear again. “They’ve been doing okay?”

“Better than other strays I’ve taken in,” says Father P. This time it’s Ty who grumbles. “Anyway. I’ve told them you only have a few minutes—”

“—which I appreciate—”

“—so I’m going to hand the phone over before Miss Bowen here implodes.”

There’s a clattering, a scuffling. She thinks she hears someone swear. Then silence. Darcy waits, knocking her head into the tile of the wall.

“Hello?” says a soft voice, almost a whisper. High, sweet. Very young. “Is this—is this Lilith?”

Darcy works moisture back up into her mouth. “Put me on speaker, will you?” she says, and she has to force the accent at first, drag it out of her. Then it starts coming easier, smoother. Honey through water. “I want to talk to both of you.”

“Oh.” There’s a bit of excited murmuring, and then a click and a clunk. This time when Tandy speaks, it echoes a little. “Okay. Um. Yeah. You’re on speaker.”

“This is Tandy?” Lilith says, and she hears Ty say, “H-Holy shit, it i-is h-her.” Tandy says, _shhhhh_.

“Yeah, this is—this is Tandy. Bowen. And Ty, I don’t know if you remember Ty, but—”

“Of course I remember Ty. I remember both of you.” Her eyes are stinging, all of a sudden, as if she has soap in them. “I don’t have a lot of time. Everything’s okay? You’re both doing all right?”

“W-We’re f-fine.” Ty sounds curious, more than anything. “W-Well. Okay. W-We c-can’t stay here all the t-time, but it’s—it’s b-better.”

“That’s good, at least.” She can hear Elena talking, hear someone laughing. She can’t stay in here long. “What did you want to talk to me about? Father Lantom said you had a question for me.”

They mutter to each other for a few seconds. She can only catch a word or two. “J-Just _ask_ ,” Ty says, and there’s a babbling from Tandy that includes the words _but_ and _embarrassed_ and _ohmigod_. She just waits. Finally, there’s a scraping sound, as if someone’s drawn back a chair. “Yeah, um.” Tandy swallows. “You know, I don’t—I’ve been looking around on Twitter, and nobody’s been able to find you. And I guess—I wanted to know if you were okay. Which is—which is super-dumb, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have asked, you don’t even know me and I’m worrying about stupid things and of course you’re okay, you answered the phone. But—”

“I’m all right,” Darcy says, low, and Tandy shuts up. “I’ve been better, but I’m all right.” And she’s not going to cry, god _fucking_ dammit. “What about you? Both of you.”

“We’re okay,” Tandy says. “I mean, I feel like an enormous idiot. For what happened. I messed up really bad, and you know. You helped. So there’s that.”

“You’re not an idiot, Tandy. And you didn’t mess up. None of what happened was your fault.”

“I k-k-keep telling her th-that. M-Maybe she’ll l-listen t-to you.”

“Tandy, seriously. Don’t blame yourself.” She takes a deep breath. “And everything’s okay at the cathedral? Father Lantom’s doing okay?”

“Yeah. Like Ty said, we can’t stay with Father Lantom all the time, it’s not fair, and we can make our own way. But yeah. We’re okay. Ty?”

“B-Better,” says Ty again. He hesitates. “Are you—A-Are you c-coming b-back?”

“Coming back?” she says, but she already knows. Her cheeks feel wet. Darcy closes her eyes, knocks her head against the tile again. She hears a footstep outside the door, and knows it’s Matt. “Yeah,” she says, when neither Tandy nor Ty seem to be able to find the words. “I’m coming back. I never really left.”

Someone sighs. She’s not sure if it’s her or Tandy. Then Ty says, “G-Good,” in a voice that makes her think he’s trying not to sound like a child. She doesn’t think Ty could sound like a child even if he wanted to, but she doesn’t say that. “G-Good. Because—because yeah. G-Good.”

“Masks don’t help people like us,” she says. “Right?”

There’s another sigh, from Ty this time. “A-Apparently, th-there are d-different kinds of masks.”

Matt knocks on the door. Darcy says, “Okay,” and then presses the phone close against her cheek. “I have to go. I’ll see if I can come by the cathedral soon, all right? I don’t know when, but maybe. To see how you’re doing.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Bullshit I don’t have to,” Darcy snaps, and then reins herself back in. “I’ll come around in a couple of days. All right? Keep an eye on the alley outside. I’ll knock.”

“Yeah,” says Tandy, because Ty doesn’t seem to be able to speak. “Okay.”

“I have to go,” she says again. “Tell Father Lantom I said thank you, all right? And don’t worry about me. I’m fine.” Darcy bites her lip. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Yeah.” Tandy sounds almost awed. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Goodbye,” Darcy says, and hangs up. She needs a good two minutes before she can work up the strength to open the bathroom door. Matt’s standing by the frame, fiddling with the hem of his sleeve. He lifts his head when she comes out, his fingers closing around her hand as she presses his phone back into his palm.

“You all right?”

She focuses on breathing, just for a little while. “Did you ever hear from that girl you told me about? The one—the one whose father was abusing her. While we were still in school.”

Matt shakes his head once.

“Do you know her name?”

He cocks his head, thoughtful. “Mickey. Her name was Michaela, but everyone called her Mickey.” His mouth twists. “Except her dad.”

Darcy watches him. Then she steps into him, because she needs the touch. Matt draws his fingers down the length of her spine, letting her lean. “How often do you think about her?”

She feels it when he sighs, breath stirring the hair against her ear. “Almost every day.”

So it’s normal, then. She breathes in the smell of him—aftershave, skin, Matt—and then draws back. “Thanks. For giving me the phone.”

His lips quirk up. “Of course.”

“It feels weird to be so happy,” she says, and Matt hooks an arm around her shoulders, pulling her just close enough that he can put his mouth to her temple. She sighs, just a bit. For some reason, all she can think is of a book she can’t remember, a character she can’t name. _This world goes on, stupid and brutal, but I do not. Don’t you see? I do not._ And then Zusak, again. _Like most misery, it starts with apparent happiness._ “I mean, there’s—there’s been so much shit. And now it’s just—it’s just this. It’s—It’s wine and laughter and people we care about who are smiling. It’s so disparate.”

“It won’t always be like this.”

“I know. That’s what makes it so strange.” She hooks her fingers through his, dangling from her shoulder. She feels like a teenager, just a little. Not that that’s too far out of her way. Darcy turns her head, pushing into the side of his throat. “Are you going out, tonight?”

“Yeah.” Nobody’s looking at them. Matt brushes his fingertips down the line of her spine. “Did you—are you coming?”

It’s the first time he’s asked that since Fisk, since Vanessa. It might be the first time he’s asked, ever. She takes a breath.

“Yeah,” she says. “I think I am. And then after, I’d—I’d really like to go home.”

The muscles in his arm go tight. Then he pushes his mouth against her temple again, and she closes her eyes. _Mine,_ she thinks, again, and puts one arm around him. _Mine_. And it may be monstrous, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good. It may be monstrous, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

“Good,” says Matt, and Darcy smiles.

.

.

.

 **Lilith (@theangelofmercy)** : @lamanchaman @maskwatchnyc @kamala_k @archersdoitbetter As much as I love Carmen Sandiego, my name’s actually Lilith, please and thank.

 **Victor ManCHA (@lamanchaman)** : @theangelofmercy  oH MY FUCK INGOD ARE YOUS HITTING ME RIGH TNOW

 **KHAAAAAAAAN (@kamala_k):** @theangelofmercy I AM DEAD BURY ME IN HELL’S KITCHEN

 **RooKate (@archersdoitbetter):** @theangelofmercy Look at you all technological and stuffs #whereintheworldistheangelofmercy

 **Lilith (@theangelofmercy):** @kamala_k @lamanchaman @archersdoitbetter @theurichreport Keep your eyes open for us, kids. We’ll be around.

 **The Urich Report (@theurichreport):** @theangelofmercy Is there a possibility I might be able to have a word with you?

 **Lilith (@theangelofmercy):** @theurichreport Thought you’d never ask.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @theurichreport is obviously Ben, just as @archersdoitbetter is Kate.  
> @lamanchaman is Victor Mancha, from Runaways; son of Ultron, cyborg, dorkface extraordinaire.  
> @mini_nico is Nico Minoru, also from Runaways, daughter of two witches from another dimension.  
> @betsysy is Betsy, if that wasn't obvious as well.  
> @kamala_k is Kamala Khan from the new Ms. Marvel series. I love her and she is my darling. 
> 
> Yes, the dark-haired woman at the bar is Jessica Jones, and YES, I DID THROW SPIDER-MAN IN THERE. BITE ME. Up to you if you want to headcanon him as Peter or Miles. (I'm favoring Miles, personally.) 
> 
> My Clint is always 616 Clint. Get this Ultimate Clint!AOU trash away from me. 
> 
> "The world may be stupid and brutal" is a quote from Revolution, by Jennifer Donnelly. Don't question me. Just read it.
> 
> I borrowed Mickey's name from the Man Without Fear comics (reboot of Daredevil from the 90s) so. Yeah. 
> 
> Translation:  
> Darcy: “This is what you get for taking Punjabi, I keep telling you. What are these idiots telling you about his fleet of hovercrafts?”  
> Elena: “Oh, don’t be mean. They are both trying very hard.”  
> Darcy: “It’s fun to tease him, that’s all. You’re doing okay?”  
> Elena: “I am home. I am much better simply for being home.”  
> Darcy: “Kate’s not bugging you too much?”  
> Elena: “Kate just needs a firm hand. Like all of you, in a way. She’s a good girl. She’s been very kind, doing all of this.”  
> Darcy: “Kate feels like she has to prove something. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but I think—I think this is helping. So in a way, it’s good for her, too. You’re sure you’re okay?”  
> Elena: “Darling girl. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m perfectly well. And it seems like all is well for you, too. The fight’s over?”  
> Darcy: “The fight’s resolved. Everyone is doing better. Karen’s well, Foggy’s well. I’m well. Getting better.”  
> Elena: “Not fighting with Mr. Murdock anymore, either, I see.”  
> Darcy: “Don’t you start. I’m already getting I-told-you-sos from everyone else, I don’t need them from you.”  
> Darcy: “You’re terrible. Foggy, what did you want to ask her about?”  
> Foggy: “Jesus, you guys talk fast. I’ve been looking into online classes and stuff but I feel like an idiot. I caught like—one word out of that. Which was hovercraft.”  
> Darcy: “I’ve been practicing with Karen. Maybe you and Jen could start studying together? She’s trying to teach herself Spanish, too. Anyway, what did you want to ask her? I offer you my services in translation, oh brother dear.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [i see nothing (but a thousand silhouettes)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4855298) by [concertine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/concertine/pseuds/concertine)
  * [made of memories you bury (or live by)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5888887) by [concertine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/concertine/pseuds/concertine)
  * [bad luck (always came in threes)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5926978) by [shuofthewind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind)




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